


Necessary Sins

by MidnightJen



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 03 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-08-29 09:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 45
Words: 226,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8484100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidnightJen/pseuds/MidnightJen
Summary: It was just an offhand comment but it set them on a path neither could have expected. Season 4 redux.





	1. Prologue

It occurred to him, lying, as he was, in bed beside Juliette, that until this morning, he had never actually had a proper conversation with Adalind. Even when he’d been protecting her from the bee wesen their exchanges hadn’t been conversations so much as mine fields of double speak and hidden meanings. That double date they’d sat through, Nick had been more focused on trying to find fault in Adalind than in actually taking part in the conversation and well, pretty much every other time they’d been trying to kill each other or exchanging threats.

Possibly, if he’d ever bothered to actually have a conversation with Adalind before now, everything that had happened before Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding could have been avoided.

If they had talked he wouldn’t be lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and worrying that Juliette’s distant mood since they’d returned from the reception was some sort of sign she knew something had happened. At least worrying that Juliette knew or suspected something was easier to think about than what had actually happened and what it really meant.

He’d cheated on her. Cheated on her with Adalind of all people. Only, did it count as cheating when he hadn’t actually known it was Adalind? Did it count as cheating when he’d thought he’d been having sex with Juliette? And what about the second time? Did that count as cheating if it was necessary to undo what Adalind disguised as Juliette had done?

He wanted to say no, to believe firmly that it had all been out of his control and that the blame landed at the feet of the Royals and maybe Adalind but he couldn’t. Adalind had done what she thought was necessary to be reunited with her daughter and, well, he’d done what was necessary to stay a Grimm.

But did having sex with Adalind (twice) count as cheating when it was done out of necessity? Did it count as cheating when neither of them had wanted to do it but both of them had to?

He couldn’t stay in bed beside Juliette while he was thinking about sleeping with Adalind. It just highlighted the fact that, while his brain was determined to view the whole thing clinically and objectively, in his heart he felt like he’d betrayed Juliette.

Because, in the end, whether or not it had been their idea, that second time, when it had been him and Adalind fully aware of what they were doing? Yeah, he’d kind of liked it.

The sex, once they’d gotten over the awkwardness of the situation and decided to embrace it, had been pretty fucking spectacular.

Cleaning up Weston Steward’s blood offered him a distraction but cleaning didn’t really require much focus. Since he’d become a Grimm, he’d spent a lot of time scrubbing blood off of one surface or another and so, even as his hands dragged the cloth back and forth to soak up the blood, his mind wandered.

He just wished it would wander in Juliette’s direction and not offer him up a replay of his time with Adalind in full colour with all of his senses joining in. Jesus, he could still smell her. Never mind the fact that bleach was burning his nostrils, Adalind’s scent was already burned into his mind. He could vividly remember the feel of her skin, the way she tasted and the sounds she made as she writhed beneath him.

She’d met him move for move and given he’d been more than a little angry – at her and the situation – things had gotten pretty rough. But she’d kept up; she’d matched his anger and fire with her own until they’d collapsed breathless beside each other, grinning when they should have found nothing enjoyable about the situation.

It had been enjoyable, though, and Nick didn’t know what he was supposed to make of that. He supposed he and Adalind had always had a very passionate relationship, you couldn’t spend so much time and energy hating a person without feeling passion, but knowing how that passion could be better spent was not at all comforting.

How did you continue to hate someone when you’d seen them at their most vulnerable, when you’d hurt them in the most heartbreaking way possible and they forgave you?

Because, as much as he’d like to pretend it had been one quick nightmarish morning filled with quick (necessary) sex, he couldn’t. The whole reason there’d been a second round and he wasn’t lying awake now freaking out about not being a Grimm anymore was because they’d talked.

Well, there’d been some yelling and fighting and the throwing of anything Adalind could get her hands on, but they had talked. And talking to Adalind, even if it meant realising she wasn’t Juliette and the whole can of worms that had opened up, was still better than the alternative. If he hadn’t spoken when he had, if he hadn’t made that remark, he’d be scrubbing the floor thinking about his time with Adalind for a whole other reason.

He’d be cleaning up the blood of Weston Steward pondering the reality of no longer being a Grimm.

So, really, wasn’t it better that he’d accidentally made that comment? Wasn’t it better that he and Adalind had managed to reverse what she’d done before it had taken hold? It couldn’t be called cheating, then, not if it truly was out of necessity. He’d done plenty of things as a Grimm that were considered wrong, this was just another in a long list of things that were slowly but surely turning him from a good cop with a strong sense of morality into one who danced the line between right and wrong and lived in the grey in between.

And all because, while Adalind had still been pretending to be Juliette he made a comment about receiving an email from his mom letting them know she’d found a safe place for her and Diana.

Nick didn’t think he’d ever forget the look on Adalind’s face then, even if she’d been wearing Juliette’s at the time. The way she’d frozen, the way her eyes had blazed with fury and then widened with horror. He hadn’t understood her look, hadn’t understood her reaction until she’d clutched her stomach looking sick and frightened and uttered a horrified, ‘Oh, god.’

He supposed that was something else he should probably be concerned about. The fact that it had been those two words, spoken in such a way that he’d immediately gone from sitting calmly in bed to standing beside it, clutching the sheet around his hips, with her name falling from his lips in an equally horrified gasp.

Things, things had sort of spiralled from there because he’d been pretty fucking pissed she’d tricked him into sleeping with her and she’d been really fucking mad he’d stolen her daughter and slipped her away to hide with his mother.

When they’d both calmed down enough to talk rationally, Nick had found himself sitting on the end of the bed he shared with Juliette beside Adalind (once again looking like herself) who was wearing one of his t-shirts because it had been the closest thing at hand when she’d wanted to cover up her nakedness. He’d managed to catch a pair of his underwear after she sent a full drawer of his things flying at his head.

Neither of them had been willing to look at the other, it was safer to stare at the destruction around them and be really, really glad that Trubel either hadn’t heard the fight or that she’d gone out.

The awkward silence after the truth had come out was actually comforting to think about. The air between them after the second round, with Adalind looking like Adalind (so they could undo the spell she’d done to strip him of his Grimm abilities, could he stress that enough?), had been laden with tension. It just wasn’t a bad kind of tension, it was the kind that came with the realisation that the sex between them was really good and the unwanted questions of what the hell they were supposed to do now.

He wanted to hate her, wanted to go back to the ugly tension and spiteful words but he didn’t know how. Tumbling onto his back, breathless and spent, things hadn’t been as awkward as they should have been. Lying beside her, knowing the thin sheet was all that shielded her naked body from his own, it had been really hard to remember why he hated her.

He was pretty sure one of the things she’d yelled at him in between rounds had been about how her actions at the start had been just a job. Not that it made it any better but now that he knew why she’d done the things she’d done and with the knowledge that being a Grimm placed you in the grey and often darker side of right and wrong, it was really hard to hold her actions against her.

But that could have been the nakedness talking because now that it was dark outside and he was kneeling in the hallway scrubbing wesen blood out of the carpet he could admit that just because the sex had been fantastic and just because they’d talked, didn’t mean he didn’t hate her.

People had sex with people they hated all the time.

And believing that lie was going to be the only way he stayed sane. If he didn’t keep reminding himself that he hated her, if he didn’t keep thinking about all the ways she’d hurt him and his friends then he’d have to think about the way she helped him straighten out the room before she left. He’d have to think about the way she’d refused to apologise for doing what was necessary to find her daughter. He’d have to think about all the guilt he felt for stealing Diana in the first place.

He’d have to think about the fact that she’d left in a pair of slightly too big leggings he’d stolen from the back of Juliette’s closet and his t-shirt because the clothes she’d walked in wearing were now too big (or torn).

If he didn’t keep reminding himself why he hated her, then he’d remember that she’d managed to make him laugh (it hadn’t exactly been a happy laugh) or that his list of problems had now grown to include worrying about Adalind because the guilt of going so far as to steal her child threatened to swallow him whole.

They’d done a lot of bad things to each other but somehow, stealing Diana from her, even though he’d honestly thought it was the best thing for the baby hexenbiest, felt like a step too far. How could he blame Adalind for doing everything she could to find her daughter?

He needed to stop thinking about this. He needed to stop thinking about her. He needed to focus on cleaning up the house so that Trubel wouldn’t be confronted with the evidence when she woke up. Then he needed to go to bed and sleep because in the morning he would need to get up and go to work and pretend like nothing had changed.

Because it hadn’t. Nothing had changed, he was still a Grimm and Monroe and Rosalee were on their way to two weeks on a beach drinking fruity drinks packed full of alcohol. No one ever needed to know what had happened before the wedding, no one needed to know how close he’d come to losing his abilities.

Juliette never needed to know he’d slept with Adalind because it hadn’t been a choice made from desire or lust. If it had, then he’d have felt guilty but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure if what had happened had been wrong but it had been necessary and so it wasn’t guilt he was feeling it was just that as much as Juliette supported his being a Grimm (well as much as she could), he knew she’d never understand how he was able to accept what had happened and move on.

As hard as she tried, and he knew she tried, Juliette would never be able to understand how something like this could just be accepted and dealt with. He sincerely doubted she’d be able to understand his willingness – his ability – to shrug this off and move on.

He hoped like hell he never had to explain it to her.


	2. Chapter1

Really, he wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that he was out in the woods at three in the morning burying a body or the fact that the body he was burying wasn’t Adalind’s. He wouldn’t have minded the mud and the rain nearly so much if every shovel full of earth he tossed aside would soon be covering her freshly killed corpse.

Jesus, the least she could have done was helped.

And okay, that was probably asking a bit too much given she had a pretty serious concussion and had been lying unconscious on the floor of her motel room when he’d finally found her. But the doctor had assured him (because apparently he looked like he cared) that she’d be fine, she just needed some rest and some sleep. The resting part she seemed to be finding pretty easy, it was warm and dry in his car and he was pretty sure she’d gotten her hands on his phone and was using it to search real estate listings for a house or apartment she couldn’t even afford.

He hated that he felt sorry for her. It just hadn’t actually occurred to him that she didn’t have anything more than the few possessions she’d thought to put in storage. Or that since she’d made herself the enemy of pretty much everyone she’d ever met, she had no access to her bank accounts or any of the secret stashes she probably had across the world.

Her lack of funds and a place to stay was the whole reason they were out in the woods when he should have been home in bed beside Juliette. Home where it was warm and dry and things weren’t confusing because being around Adalind seemed to turn everything he thought he knew on its head and honestly, she kind of made him stupid.

He’d done a lot of reckless things because of Adalind, whether it was trying to kill her or destroy her, he tended to act without thinking where she was concerned. Hence the burying the body in the early hours of the morning. And okay, yes, she’d actually done most of the work but he’d been the one to land the final killing blow when he’d burst into her motel room and found the hundjager standing over her about to bash her head in with a tire iron.

He supposed they were trying to make it look like a robbery gone wrong and, had he been thinking clearly, he probably should have just arrested the guy, but well, as he said, Adalind made him stupid and so instead he’d pulled the trigger on his crossbow and shot an arrow through the back of the hundjager’s head.

There’d been a moment after the body slumped forward over Adalind that Nick had seriously considered just turning and walking away. He’d actually made it two steps to the door before he turned back, annoyed at himself and hauled the body off her. If he lifted her off the floor with more care than he would ever admit to it, if there was some careful cradling as he manoeuvred her into the backseat of his Land Cruiser, then at least there were no witnesses.

Which he was definitely grateful for when he was stuffing the body in the back as well. And he should probably have been a little worried that he was more concerned about someone seeing him being nice to Adalind than stuffing a corpse into the back of his car.

Shaking rain out of his eyes, he tossed the shovel aside and hauled himself out of the freshly dug grave. He shot Adalind a dirty look he knew she wouldn’t see and started dragging the body of the hundjager into the hole. He’d already been through the guy’s pockets looking for anything useful (he’d found nothing but a passport he was pretty sure was fake) and so he didn’t waste time shoving the body into the hole and filling it in.

By the time he was done he was soaked, his hair was plastered to his forehead with rain and his boots were filled with water. He gave the area one last look before he tossed the shovel in the back of his car and walked around to the driver’s seat. He hated the idea of climbing behind the wheel as wet and muddy as he was but he didn’t really have much of a choice.

Adalind was asleep in the passenger seat; her head (the side free of stiches and the crisp white bandage) was resting on her hands against the window. It was unfair how innocent she could look while sleeping; it gave people the wrong idea. You just couldn’t see the evil lurking underneath when she looked like that asleep. He shook his head and turned the key in the ignition.

The sound of the engine coming to life startled Adalind awake and she pressed back against the passenger door, arm out as though to ward off a blow. Her eyes were wide and for a moment they were filled with fear. She relaxed as soon as she realised where she was and who she was with and Nick tried not to feel sorry for her.

They’d put each other through a lot over the years but he slept easily at night. He didn’t have to be afraid of where he would be when he woke up because he had a safe place to go home to every night. Adalind had none of that, she hadn’t for a long time.

He didn’t like it but he felt sorry for her. She’d done a lot of bad things – had a lot of bad done to her – but he couldn’t imagine how hard it must be to fear going to sleep. He couldn’t imagine how hard it must be to fear being so vulnerable.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked quietly.

He’d had plenty of time to think about that while he was digging the grave and the best solution he could come up with was to take her to Monroe’s. He and Rosalee weren’t due back from their honeymoon for another two days and while he doubted they’d like the idea of Adalind being in their house when they weren’t around, Nick also knew that it was the only real option he had.

He sure as hell couldn’t take her home.

Adalind said nothing when he told her his plan, she just nodded ad turned her head to look out the window. They didn’t speak again until Nick used the spare key Monroe had given him, back when they’d been living together, and let them into the small house.

‘You can use the guest room upstairs; the bed should be made up.’

He didn’t have to give her a tour, she had stayed there once before, but he didn’t feel right just leaving her. He hovered awkwardly in the entry, dripping dirty water onto the floor and shivering slightly.

‘I don’t think there’ll be much food in the house,’ he added just to fill the silence. ‘I’ll try and bring you some food tomorrow.’

She looked up at him and nodded, making his stomach twist uncomfortably. He wanted to say it was the bandage on her head that made her look so vulnerable but he couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d nearly been beaten to death just hours earlier. She might have put up a damn good fight – that hundjager had been just as beaten and bloody – but she was still the victim of an attack and she looked as shaken as he would expect any other victim to look.

He also knew she would hate that word. Adalind Schade was not a victim, he knew that too.

Without anything else to say he turned from her, intending to leave – he really wanted to be warm again and couldn’t wait to get home and take a hot shower and put on some clean, dry clothes. She stopped him, though, calling to him from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Nick?’

He turned back to look at her and there was that vulnerability again. ‘Yeah?’

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t know what he was supposed to say so he just nodded his head and left. He’d apologise to Monroe later (if he ever even told his friend about this) for letting Adalind into his home. He cast one last look over his shoulder as he walked to the curb, Adalind had turned the light on up in the little attic room, though he couldn’t actually see movement up there.

He wished he could just walk away, that he could go home and never have to think about Adalind again but he knew he wouldn’t. Whatever they’d done to each other in the past, it didn’t change what was happening now. He felt obligated to help her because of what he and his friends had done. Trying to kill her was one thing but stealing away her child was another thing entirely.

He wanted to go home and never have to look at her again but of course he couldn’t. Oh he went home and he got cleaned up before he sprawled face down on the couch downstairs – he couldn’t bring himself to crawl into bed when he’d only have to get up in an hour to go to work. He also didn’t want to lie down next to Juliette when his mind was once more full of Adalind; it only served to remind him of his betrayal.

Someone had sent that hundjager after Adalind, probably one of the Royals, as she’d certainly made enemies of enough of them. He hadn’t just broken into her motel room while she was sleeping to kill her, he’d wanted something from her, he’d asked questions, Adalind had said. Some about Diana, some about things she knew nothing about. She seemed to think Viktor had sent the wesen but they couldn’t be sure now that he was dead. All Nick could do was run the passport through the system when he got into work and follow the trail from there.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with Adalind. She couldn’t stay at Monroe and Rosalee’s indefinitely, his friends didn’t even know she was still in town and he’d have kind of liked to keep it that way. The less she had to do with him and his friends, the less likely any of them were to find out they’d slept together the day of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding.

God he hoped no one ever found out about that.

He fell asleep thinking about the hundjager who’d attacked her and whether or not he really had to do anything to help her beyond what he’d already done and so naturally his dreams were filled with Adalind.

He just wished they were the kind he used to have where they were killing each other and not the kind he had now where she was naked and writhing beneath him, her breath coming in ragged gasps as she moved her hips in rhythm with his own.

He woke to the sound of his alarm with Adalind’s name on his lips because his subconscious apparently had it out for him. He was just glad that he hadn’t been talking in his sleep and that Juliette and Trubel were both still upstairs and so hadn’t had to witness the way he jolted awake, the rapid beat of his heart having nothing to do with the shock of his alarm going off.

He sat up and turned to place his bare feet on the floor. He scrubbed his face with his hands and the reached out to kill the obnoxious beeping that was making his phone dance across the coffee table. He didn’t feel like he’d had any sleep at all. The natural light in the room was enough to make him squint and his back and shoulders ached from all the digging he’d done. For all the thinking he’d done, he still didn’t have a solution to the Adalind problem.

He still wasn’t convinced she was even really his problem but he kind of felt responsible for her current predicament. If it weren’t for him, she’d be hiding out somewhere with Diana and far away from Portland. Maybe she’d have looked to the Resistance to help, maybe she’d have joined forces with the Royals after making some sort of deal that would keep her alive, he didn’t know. What he did know was that he was the one to send Diana off with his mother.

He was the one she’d called when she’d been in trouble.

Just trying to wrap his head around that was hard enough. He didn’t know how to even start thinking about the fact that he’d immediately rolled out of bed and gone to her rescue.

He and Adalind were enemies. They hated each other and had tried to kill each other more than once. So what if they’d had sex twice? Adalind had slept with a lot of people, that shouldn’t have had any sway over him. Hell, he wasn’t sure it did have any sway over him when he was awake and his subconscious wasn’t trying to ruin him. So why had she called him? Why had he gone?

Out of curiosity, he picked up his phone and opened the browser, flicking through the history to see what she’d been looking at the night before. They weren’t real estate listings like he’d have expected – she’d been looking for a job. Which he supposed made sense. It wasn’t like she could buy or even rent an apartment without the money to pay for it.

A job would go a long way to regaining her independence but she still needed a place to live. If last night had shown them anything, it was that a motel wasn’t safe enough. He somehow doubted his newlywed friends would welcome Adalind once more into their home.

With a sigh, Nick tossed his phone back onto the coffee table and headed for the kitchen and some coffee. Someone must have come down at some point, managing not to wake him, because there was fresh coffee in the pot. Grateful, he poured himself a very full mug and started out of the kitchen for the stairs.

Trubel was coming down as he was going up and he grunted a greeting at her, not yet feeling human enough to interact properly. She smirked at him but wisely didn’t comment. Juliette was in the bathroom when he walked into their bedroom and he called out a greeting as he went in search of pants and a shirt.

‘Hey,’ Juliette greeted softly, coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. ‘What time did you get home?’

He glanced up at her over the dresser and then back down, musing as he did so how when they’d first moved in together the sight of her emerging from their shared bathroom used to get him so hot. ‘Maybe five?’

‘Is everything okay?’

If it had been anyone else, Nick would have immediately told her what had happened. If she’d had been Monroe or Rosalee, heck even Renard, he’d have easily told her why he’d run out of the house (perhaps not naming Adalind, though), barely pausing to pull on some clothes. He couldn’t tell her the truth, though, couldn’t tell her that it had been Adalind who called him for help. He couldn’t tell her it was Adalind he’d driven to the hospital; Adalind he’d sat with while a nurse stitched up the deep gash on her forehead. He couldn’t tell her Adalind was the reason he’d been out so late burying the body of a hundjager who may or may not have worked for the Royals.

He could never tell her about burying the body.

So what the hell did he tell her? Why hadn’t he been thinking about that last night instead of focusing so completely on Adalind?

‘Nick?’ Juliette apparently thought his inability to answer stemmed from worry. Well he supposed it kind of did, just not the kind of worry she thought.

Eventually he managed to say, ‘A witness from one of my cases was attacked last night. By the time I got to her motel her attacker was gone but I had to take her to the hospital and stay with her while I arranged for a place for her to stay and some protection.’

His story contained enough of the truth that he knew it would satisfy Juliette. It occurred to him that she had never pushed him for details about his cases before but whenever something involved wesen she wanted to know everything. It wasn’t a comfortable thought, especially when it came on the tail of lying to her about all things Adalind, and so he quickly tugged on some clean jeans and a fresh t-shirt. He could feel her eyes on him but he thought he knew her well enough to peg the look as one of concern and not suspicion.

She was worried about how last night had affected him and she didn’t even know what he’d really been up to. ‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. He finished getting dressed, took another quick mouthful of coffee and then stole a quick kiss on his way into the bathroom to brush his teeth and do something about his hair.

He was in and out of the bathroom so quickly Juliette hadn’t even pulled on her underwear. He didn’t realise until he tugged the front door closed behind him that he hadn’t said a proper goodbye. He also hadn’t taken any time to appreciate the fact that she was naked.

There was clearly something wrong with him. How the hell could he spend what few minutes of sleep he’d managed to grab dreaming about his time with Adalind and not even really notice Juliette standing right in front of him wearing nothing at all?

He was lucky to discover, when he arrived at his desk, that they hadn’t caught a new case. He used the time to finish off the white lies that made up his report on the octopus headed wesen and then, against his better judgement, he found himself looking at real estate listings. He wasn’t necessarily even looking at them for Adalind (at least that’s what he told himself), it would pay to have somewhere he could go where his enemies couldn’t find him.

It was a wonder he hadn’t considered it before, given the number of times wesen and other criminals had broken into his house looking for the Grimm or something they thought he had in his possession. As handy as the trailer was, out in the woods, it didn’t exactly make for a good safe house as it lacked basic amenities like plumbing.

The idea of forcing Adalind to hide out there was actually kind of appealing. She’d hate it and she’d hate him for even suggesting it but he knew she’d stay there if it was her only option. Still, he didn’t think he was quite ready to let his enemy camp out in his trailer with all of his important Grimm possessions.

He was already regretting letting her into Monroe’s home while his friend was away. He was pretty sure that violated a number of codes both legal and of the friendship variety.

He got a message from Adalind around 2pm (apparently she’d added her number to his phone when she’d had it the night before) letting him know she’d left Monroe’s. There was nothing else in the message just that little bit of information. It annoyed him and for one wild moment he entertained the idea of calling her and chewing her out but then he remembered he didn’t much care what she was doing and it was actually a good thing she’d decided to go do her own thing.

He’d done as little as he could for her and he was just happy to be rid of her. He’d run the passport and found a basic cover story of bodyguard attached to a private security company that was owned by a shell corporation Nick had little doubt would be traced back to the Royals. But if Adalind was going it on her own he didn’t have to worry about who the guy was.

Not unless his friends came looking for revenge, if they ever even found out who killed him. Which was actually a possibility but not one he was really worried about. He had plenty of experience dealing with the Verrat and whatever else the Royals felt like throwing at him.

Maybe he’d get lucky and they’d blame Adalind. Maybe he wouldn’t be on time to save her next time.

As pleasant a thought as that was he somehow doubted he’d get that lucky. Because either she’d somehow manage to save herself or she’d call him and he’d stupidly go to her rescue like he had last night.

If only he could have ignored the sounds coming through the phone after she’d dropped it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t that kind of Grimm, he certainly wasn’t the kind of man (or cop) who could stand by and ignore the sounds of someone being murdered.

Mores the pity.

Distraction came in the form of a new case and Nick was grateful for the chance for something more than paperwork to do. There was only so much coffee he could drink to stay awake for that tedium before it stopped being effective. Walking around a crime scene in fresh air seemed like a much better way to spend his time. Even if the case turned out to be entirely non-wesen and mostly open and shut.

The victim was a man in his late thirties. His cleaning lady had discovered him when she stopped in to replace the sheets on the bed in the guest room and to generally air the place out. It was a bit unfortunate it would take a while to air that particular smell out of the apartment.

After she’d called the police, the cleaning lady had called the victim’s fiancé. She did a good job of looking like the devastated fiancé but Nick didn’t buy it. Some probing questions and a review of the hallway security tapes showed the fiancé was the only one to come in or out of the apartment in the last two days. The fiancé stood by her innocence no matter how much they pushed her and without any evidence to support his suspicions they had to let her go.

It didn’t sit well with Nick but he couldn’t argue when the hours she spent thinking she was free just made the arrest all the sweeter when a crime scene tech turned up the murder weapon buried at the bottom of the turtle terrarium. It was a pretty decent hiding place, all things considered, but as clever as it had been hiding it essentially in plain sight, the fiancé hadn’t factored in how difficult it is to completely destroy blood evidence on a knife.

She spent her last night of freedom thinking she’d gotten away with murder and it made her shock and outrage all the more satisfying when they turned up on her doorstep the next morning to arrest her.

In interview, after they picked her up, she still refused to admit to her guilt. She clammed up tight and refused to say a word without her lawyer present, which was fine with Hank and Nick, they had the evidence now and a little poking around turned up a history of fights and break ups between the pair. The woman’s own mother didn’t seem surprised to learn her daughter had killed her fiancé. The only thing she had to say about it was that the act must have been in self-defence.

Nick left that to the DA’s office to sort out, comfortable he’d done everything he could to make the case stick.

He had an email from Monroe and Rosalee waiting for him when he returned to his desk, letting him know they were leaving to catch their flights and would be home soon. It sounded like they’d had a great time away from all of the wesen drama and it made him wonder if maybe it wasn’t time to start thinking about his future with Juliette again.

Over the last year there had always been something getting in the way but now things were more settled and Juliette was getting comfortable with his life – as comfortable as she could get at any rate. Did she still want a future with him? Did she still think about marriage and kids? Because Nick did, he wanted that future and he was tired of waiting for life to calm down enough to take the chance.

Maybe it was time he took the chance again and asked Juliette to marry him. He’d been ready for years, surely Juliette was ready now?

Thinking about his future had him searching through real estate listings again, looking at the unusual locations and not the normal houses and apartments. He wanted somewhere out of the way, somewhere safe he could retreat to if things ever got so bad he had to leave his house. There were a few that seemed promising but as keen as he was, it wasn’t like he just had the extra cash lying around. Something as big as buying a safe house, Juliette was going to notice.

The thought brought him up short. When he’d started looking for a safe place to run to he hadn’t much thought beyond the simple needs of a safe place to run to. Was he really considering purchasing a safe house without telling Juliette about it? He supposed it would be safer if no one knew where to find it or him if he ever did have to run but to not tell Juliette about it? To keep something like that from her, was that necessary? It wasn’t like Juliette couldn’t be trusted.

That wasn’t where the reluctance came from, he realised. This wasn’t about his ability to trust Juliette, or any of his friends for that matter; this was about having a backup location that was safe and secure because no one knew about it. There might come a day when Monroe and Rosalee needed a place to run to, when he and Juliette needed a place to hide. The less people who knew about it now, the less people there would be to lead potential enemies to them later.

Jesus, where was all this paranoia coming from?

It probably had something to do with being under investigation by the FBI. And all of his issues with the Royals likely didn’t help. Maybe he was just starting to realise that living in a house everyone could easily break into wasn’t the best idea. The whole Adalind thing would never have happened if he’d been living somewhere off the grid.

And he was thinking about Adalind again. He’d managed to go an entire day without thinking about her but now he had to admit, he should probably check up on Monroe and Rosalee’s house just to make sure Adalind hadn’t blown it up in a fit of revenge. He’d like to think he’d have heard if she’d done something so overt but he wouldn’t put it passed her to do something sneaky but evil all the same.

When he let himself in to their house, he had to admit, even if she had done something there wasn’t much hope he’d find it before it could harm either of his friends. He wouldn’t even know what he was supposed to be looking for. Still, he gave the house a thorough once over, making sure Adalind hadn’t left any nasty surprises (or just generally any evidence she’d been there).

He found nothing, not that he really expected to, Adalind had even cleaned up the muddy boot prints he must have left behind when he dropped her off. That threw him a little but he shrugged the gesture off as another way to make sure her stay went unnoticed. He didn’t imagine she wanted anyone to know she was still in Portland any more than he did.

If she wasn’t his problem anymore then he was free to go home and enjoy the night with Juliette. On the drive home, he thought about picking up some take-out and having a nice relaxing night in. He and Juliette hadn’t really done the romantic night he’d sort of been expecting after the wedding (at the time he’d been incredibly grateful) and so perhaps they should try now.

What better way to seek out Juliette’s thoughts on their future than a romantic evening in without any of the fuss of having to cook and prepare dinner?

Assuming Trubel wasn’t around.

Amused, Nick decided against the take-out idea and thought he might as well cook dinner. He and Juliette weren’t going to be having that talk about their future over dinner, not with Trubel around, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t lay the foundations during dinner, drop a few hints and then maybe actually bring it up later when they were in bed.

Thinking about having that kind of serious conversation with Juliette in bed made his stomach twist uncomfortably. The last woman he’d had a serious conversation with on that bed had been Adalind after (between?) betrayals.

He was going to have to burn the bed. Well, maybe just the sheets. He hated to think that what happened between he and Adalind could forever taint the bedroom he shared with Juliette but the thought of discussing what he wanted from the future with Juliette in the very spot he’d inadvertently cheated on her with his worst (more like pseudo) enemy just didn’t feel like a great omen for that future he wanted.

How did you take the next step toward marriage and that future when the very spot you had the most important conversation was a constant reminder that you’d cheated on your girlfriend? Even if he hadn’t done it intentionally (the first time) or because he’d really wanted to (the second time), his bedroom now held more than just memories of happier times. It carried the constant reminder of what he’d done.

Unfortunately, burning the whole room just seemed like overkill.


	3. Chapter 2

Necessary Sins – Chapter 2

 

Yeah, he had no idea how this had happened. He was actually sure it defied explanation. He’d been having a perfectly ordinary day, well as far as these things went when you worked robbery homicide and happened to be a Grimm. 

Who knew golems were actually a thing?

That he at least could explain away. What he couldn’t explain was how he’d gone from dealing with a golem to having dinner with Adalind. In the two weeks since he’d rescued her for the hundjager he’d heard from her exactly once. She’d sent him a text letting him know she’d applied for a number of jobs and had to put him down as a reference.

He’d had a tough time wrapping his head around that one and he’d spent a good couple of hours trying to figure out what exactly she was planning to say to prospective employers to explain their connection. He’d also wondered what kind of job she was applying for that she’d put him down as a reference. He had to assume she’d also put down some of the people she’d worked for at Burman’s.

Then he’d gotten a call from Portland State and learned Adalind had been going for a position at the University. He hadn’t asked what she’d be doing there – he hadn’t much cared to be honest – but he’d said nice things about her anyway. The fact he hadn’t had to lie much was probably something to be concerned about. He had to admit, though, that as far as he knew she was hardworking, incredibly smart and not afraid to fight really hard to get what she wanted. He supposed that would make her a good employee.

It wasn’t like he’d ever thought about it before.

Honestly, he hadn’t much thought about it after the phone call with the woman from the Law Department, either. He’d had other things on his mind, like the fact that just when he’d given up on the whole safe house idea, he’d found the perfect loft in an old paint factory. It had taken some juggling to manage the payments but he thought he’d succeeded in purchasing the loft without anyone being the wiser. So he’d been thinking about that, about his future with Juliette and the pressure the FBI and Chavez were putting on him over Weston Steward’s death instead of worrying what Adalind was getting up to.

In a way he understood why Chavez was focusing on him in the case (he was a Grimm, she was wesen) but he thought the fact that Renard had given a pretty clear statement regarding the whole incident and that Trubel had been very open regarding the whole thing should have cleared things up. Plus, why he was the focus of Chavez’s investigation when Trubel was also a Grimm, he didn’t know. Every time they crossed paths he got the feeling she wanted something more from him than just an explanation for why Steward was even in his house to begin with.

The problem was, he genuinely had no idea what she wanted from him. As far as he could tell there was no reason for her to be looking at him and his life with such scrutiny. He’d had encounters with the FBI before, none of which could be said to have ended well, but just because they hadn’t ended well didn’t mean he could think of any reason they’d be looking at him so closely.

These were the things he was thinking about, not Adalind, when Juliette announced she was having a girls’ night and he needed to be out of the house for a few hours. He thought about visiting Monroe and Rosalee but his friends had already made plans and he didn’t want to make them feel like they should cancel to keep him company.

It wasn’t like he and Juliette were having troubles like the last time he’d found himself kicked out of the house.

He probably could have gone out for drinks with Hank but he wasn’t really in the mood and so he ended up at the loft tidying up and moving in the few bits of furniture he’d manage to scrounge together just in case the time ever came when he needed some place to go. The loft wasn’t much but it would probably make for a good hideaway if his mother came back to town.

Maybe he could move the contents of the trailer to the loft? If he left the empty trailer in the woods it would be harder for someone to get their hands on his heritage. Then again, that would mean he was spending too much time going back and forth from the loft and that would likely draw unwanted attention to it.

It was probably the fact that the distraction was so welcome (assembling a bed and a table wasn’t exactly a fun way to spend a Thursday night) that he didn’t baulk when the caller ID on his phone lit up with Adalind’s name. That didn’t mean he answered it straight away, there was some debating first whether or not he even wanted to talk to her ever again. He was pretty sure he didn’t, but that didn’t seem to prevent him from reaching out and answering the call.

‘Adalind?’ Honestly he’d half expected to hear the sounds of a struggle and have to rush off to help her.

‘Nick.’ Adalind didn’t sound confident like she normally did. Even when she’d realised she’d disguised herself as Juliette for nothing she’d been sure of her actions and her words. As long as he’d known Adalind she’d been strong and capable but she didn’t sound it on the phone. She’d somehow managed to make his name sound hesitant and perhaps nervous.

That set him on edge faster than if she’d been screaming his name for help.

‘Hi,’ and now he was the one who sounded unsure. They’d never really just had a conversation before, he wasn’t sure you could count those awkward sentences after they’d had sex as a conversation and everything in between rounds had been bitter and angry. Every conversation they’d had leading up to that…incident had been angry or laced with double meanings. He honestly didn’t know how to talk to her without exchanging snark.

‘I got the job.’

‘Congratulations?’ It sounded more like a question than he meant it to but what else was he supposed to say? It wasn’t like they were friends, it wasn’t like he actually cared that she’d gotten a job, it didn’t make a difference to his life at all.

‘Thanks.’ There was something in her voice he’d never heard before and he didn’t know what to make of it. Did she sound disappointed? Was she expecting more from him? He didn’t think that was the case, what could she possible expect from him?

‘I haven’t heard from my mom.’

Adalind made a sound in the back of her throat that sounded like annoyance but he got the feeling it wasn’t directed at him. ‘That’s not why I called.’

‘Oh.’ What was he supposed to say? Was he supposed to ask why she called? Because, honestly, he’d regretted answering the phone about two seconds after he picked it up.

‘I don’t even know why I called,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. It made him feel better about this whole situation, that she was just as uncomfortable as he was. That maybe she too was constantly questioning the whole stupid thing between them. He hadn’t spent much time thinking about her in the last couple of weeks but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been thinking about her at all. He was still dreaming about her and he still worried that what had happened between them coloured his relationship with Juliette.

How could he even think about marrying her when he was keeping something like this from her? Did he even want to marry her? What did it say about their relationship that he felt like he could keep this from her? It wasn’t like the whole thing had been his fault. He’d had no reason to expect Adalind to seduce him disguised as Juliette and well, sleeping with Adalind while she looked like herself had only been to undo what she’d just done to him.

He couldn’t be held accountable for that, something he knew Monroe would understand, Rosalee too. In a way, he knew Juliette would understand as well, but he also knew she wouldn’t understand why, faced with the idea of losing his abilities as a Grimm, he’d bothered to sleep with Adalind to undo it.

Every time he thought about telling Juliette the truth, that’s what he thought she would bring up. Oh, he had no doubt she’d be angry – at him but mostly at Adalind – but once she’d calmed down she would ask him why he hadn’t thought about being normal. Why he hadn’t taken the opportunity Adalind had handed him to take back control of his life.

If the comments she’d been making lately about the turns their lives had taken since he’d become a Grimm were anything to go by, she wouldn’t understand why the idea had never occurred to him. And the idea really hadn’t occurred to him. He was a Grimm; he may not have had his abilities for more than a few years but they were so much a part of who he was now, he didn’t know how to be the old Nick who was nothing more than a detective.

As soon as Adalind had confessed what she’d done he’d demanded she undo it. Monroe and Rosalee would understand that but he just couldn’t imagine, after everything he’d put them through, that Juliette would see it the same way.

Adalind hadn’t questioned the desire, even though it meant she had to sleep with him again. Sex between them the first time had been a necessary step to getting her daughter back (or so she’d thought), she hadn’t been obliged to give him his powers back, especially not after he’d accidentally revealed he was the one who had taken Diana from her. Leaving him powerless would have made more sense; she could easily have chosen to leave him powerless as payback.

But she hadn’t, she hadn’t even questioned his desire to regain his powers and she’d done what was necessary to give them back to him. Admittedly, there’d been the issue of his being her only chance to ever see Diana again hanging over them but she could just have easily used that as her leverage for giving his powers back.

Adalind’s understanding was ultimately what he blamed for what happened next. He couldn’t imagine any other reason the words would have fallen out of his mouth. Insanity perhaps? ‘Do you want to grab some dinner?’

He’d surprised her, that much was evident in the sharp inhale his enhanced hearing picked up through the phone. It didn’t stop her from agreeing to join him.

‘Can you come and get me?’ The question was tentative, like if she asked too much he would realise how insane the proposition was and just abandon her.

There really wasn’t any reason he couldn’t go and get her, he didn’t imagine her money situation had improved much since he’d last seen her, so she wasn’t likely to take a cab. He was pretty sure her new job at Portland State hadn’t offered her a signing bonus, not like her old law firm probably had. A suspicion that was confirmed when she gave him the name of another motel where he could find her.

When he pulled up at the door of her motel room she must have been waiting for him because she immediately came out, making a beeline for his passenger seat. She was wearing what he thought were the same jeans she’d had on that night he’d rescued her from the hundjager and a simple grey sweater and a black jacket. His job required a certain attention to detail and he easily picked up that her clothes were cheap, though decent enough quality.

It was probably the first time in her life Adalind had to shop on a budget. His first thought was to wonder if they gave her hives just from wearing such cheap labels. He managed to hold his tongue, successfully refraining from making a snide remark or asking her where she’d even gotten the money for those few things.

He doubted he’d like the answer.

She didn’t look at him as she pulled the door shut and tugged on her seatbelt, he was absurdly grateful. ‘Where are we going?’

Nick shrugged. ‘What do you feel like?’

She grimaced. ‘I’ve been living off cereal and sandwiches, anywhere is good with me.’

This time he did look over at her, eyes raking over her much more thoroughly. She had lost a lot of weight; he could see that now, her jeans and sweater showed she’d already lost her baby weight. It hadn’t occurred to him that with no money she’d be struggling with more than just the search for a place to live. He wondered how she was even affording to stay at the motel but didn’t know how to ask. He didn’t think she’d appreciate his noticing how much weight she’d lost either.

With that in mind, and knowing (against his better judgement) he was going to pay for her dinner, he moved through traffic toward a steakhouse he and Hank sometimes went to when they were looking for a decent meal and some beers. He couldn’t bring himself to take Adalind to any other kind of restaurant and he didn’t think she’d want to go anywhere more fancy, dressed down as she was. Not that he really thought she was the kind of woman to let that sort of thing get to her.

She looked like she wanted to protest when she realised where he was taking her but he felt guilty enough and so he just said, ‘I’m paying, we’re celebrating your new job.’

The smile she gave him at that was strained but genuine. ‘It’s not like anything I’ve done before but I think I need that. It’s not like I’ve made the best choices.’

He certainly couldn’t argue that, he thought agreeing to kill his aunt just highlighted the poor choices she’d made in the time he’d known her. Thinking about that, he wanted to ask why she’d done it. He wanted to know why she’d let Renard talk her into doing all of the things that had led them to this point.

What would her life have been like if she hadn’t tried to kill his aunt and poisoned Hank? Would she still have Diana? Would she still be working for the same old law firm or would she have somehow ended up in Austria working for the Royals, just in a different capacity?

He didn't ask, though.

He waited for her in front of the car and they walked together up the two steps to the door. He held it open for her, letting her precede him into the restaurant and asked, ‘What kind of job is it, anyway?’

‘Table for two,’ Adalind told the bored looking waiter playing maître d’ when he looked up as they entered. ‘Mostly research,’ she explained as they were led to a table. ‘Checking facts, grading papers, that kind of thing. Its full time and they were desperate, the man who had the job quit unexpectedly.’

‘That’s not anything like what you were doing before?’ Nick observed, parroting her earlier words back at her as a question, not knowing what else to say. He’d asked the original question mostly so they wouldn’t be standing in awkward silence.

Adalind shrugged and smiled a thank you at the waiter as she took a chair and one of the menus he offered her. ‘I’m desperate too,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ve got nothing, Nick, I really need the work. I can’t keep selling off my mother’s things I have in storage.’

Well, at least that answered the question as to how she was affording the motel and the new clothes. ‘So when do you start?’

‘Monday, thank god. I’ve got to go in tomorrow and sign off on some paper work and I’m supposed to get some notes that will help me catch up on the current research projects but it sounds like I’m going to have a lot of catching up to do.’

It was weird, how easily conversation flowed between them. Nick thought there’d be times when the silence threatened to engulf them but there just weren’t. Adalind told him what she knew about her new job, never once complaining about how little she now had and it was easy to slip into such ordinary boring conversation.

From talking about her job they moved on to his. Adalind was fascinated by his encounter with the golems and he got a bit of a glimpse of what a nerd Adalind could be when she asked him a dozen questions about how the golem was created and what its purpose was. The whole concept of such a guardian made of clay being summoned and then unknowingly controlled by a young boy intrigued her and it was easy to go from talking about that to some of his other, weirder cases.

It didn’t take him long to realise she was fascinated by the cases he’d had that involved rituals and that she was never really surprised by the violence he encountered on a daily basis. It raised questions about the kind of things she’d seen growing up and it made him wonder what his life would have been like if his mother had never left or if she’d taken him with her. Would he have already known about all of the wesen he encountered? Or would he still constantly be surprised by what these people were capable of?

Would he even have become a cop?

‘I think you would have,’ Adalind told him thoughtfully, accepting the giant slice of berry topped chocolate cake the waitress placed in front of her. ‘You like to help people.’

‘Did you always want to become a lawyer?’ he asked as the waitress slid a plate with a huge slice of apple pie (extra ice cream) in front of him.

‘God no,’ Adalind laughed, fork raised to her lips. ‘That was for my mom,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t want to be anything like her and so I went to law school.’

It wasn’t the first time Adalind had laughed during their dinner but for some reason it struck him then how weird this was. Not because it was awkward or strained but because it wasn’t weird. Sitting opposite Adalind, with good food and a couple of drinks was so easy that for a couple of hours he’d forgotten they were supposed to hate each other.

The woman he was eating dessert with was smart and funny, had a dry sense of humour and could match his weird wesen encounters story for story. When it was just the two of them with no expectations or rules, then it was so easy to just be Nick. He wasn’t Nick the cop Juliette had fallen in love with or Nick the Grimm who’d learned the world wasn’t as black and white as it seemed, he was simply Nick.

Adalind, she seemed to feel the same way. It wasn’t like they were ignoring all the bad that had happened between them. The awareness of their shared history was a constant thrum between them, but sitting opposite each other in a restaurant, talking like two normal people, it didn’t seem to matter. He’d thought mentioning how she’d tried to kill Hank or how he’d stolen her powers would bring the conversation to a screeching halt but it hadn’t.

Adalind owned her mistakes just like he did. It helped that she thought of them as mistakes. She didn’t view each of her failed attempts to ruin him as things she should be proud of and he could freely admit that until he’d stolen Diana from her, he hadn’t ever felt as bad as he did when she looked at him right after he’d used Blood of a Grimm to strip her of her powers and save Hank.

Back then, Adalind had looked at him like he'd stolen her whole world from her, like he really had killed her as she’d proclaimed. He’d felt guilty, for the briefest of moments after it had happened, he felt an overwhelming surge of guilt. Thankfully, reason had soon followed and he’d accepted what he’d done because it was necessary to save Hank.

Weirdly, getting over stealing her powers felt just as it had when he and Monroe had overlooked his accusations of child abduction and murder. It was a thing, it happened, but it wasn’t important now.

To say it was strange was an understatement. If anyone had told him just a few short months ago that he’d be having an enjoyable dinner out with Adalind Schade he’d have laughed so hard he likely would have cried. Right before he locked them in the psych ward.

‘Honestly, I’m looking forward to starting this new job,’ Adalind told him. ‘It’s something new, something different and I think I need that. I don’t exactly like how my life has turned out.’

‘What would you have done differently?’

Adalind took her time to consider the question. There were things Nick would have done differently, if he could go back and change things. There were the big things, like making sure Renard didn’t get the chance to wake Juliette, and there were little things, like lying to Hank and Wu for so long, hell, he was still lying to Wu. He could only imagine how Adalind would want to change things.

‘If I could go bad and change anything, I’d tell Sean to go to hell.’

Nick’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting that. Mind you she hadn’t been particularly specific. ‘Which time?’

‘The first time,’ she told him. ‘The first time he approached me to help deal with you.’

Nick nodded, he understood why that would be the one thing to change, the repercussions of that one change could have altered everything that happened. Would they have become enemies? Would he have stolen her powers? With her powers she wouldn’t have gone to Austria looking for a way to trade her child for her powers. Would she even have Diana?

‘Even if it meant not having Diana?’ Her daughter was a touchy subject but it wasn’t like they’d ever used kid gloves when dealing with each other. They hit where it hurt and they did it over and over again, constantly making each other’s lives worse.

It was their thing.

‘I don’t really have her now, do I?’ Adalind’s expression became tired, like she’d suddenly remembered what her life was really like. It wasn’t good food and conversation, in reality it actually kind of sucked.

Nick tried to apologise. Not because he thought he’d done the wrong thing but because he felt terrible for not telling her, but she waved him off.

‘You were right to send her with your mother,’ it didn’t sound like she was happy admitting it, which was hardly surprising. ‘I could never have kept her safe.’

That had Nick frowning. He may not have agreed with her choices and he may definitely have thought sending Diana away was for the best but that didn’t mean he thought Adalind should doubt her ability to keep her child safe. Of course, it was true, but that didn’t mean it didn’t make his insides squirm with fresh guilt. It wasn’t that she wasn’t capable of looking after herself and she’d probably have been fine if her daughter were anything other than the super powered hexenbiest she was. There were simply too many powerful people looking for her.

Adalind really had no hope of protecting Diana from them on her own. With his mother, on the other hand, was the last place they’d think to look and she was wholly capable of looking after herself and a baby hexenbiest.

That didn’t mean it didn’t make him wonder what had happened in the last few weeks to make her change her mind so completely. ‘What happened to change your mind?’

Adalind gave him another wan smile. ‘Life.’

He didn’t really have anything to say to that and so when the waiter stopped by only moments later he asked for the check. Adalind didn’t say anything about him paying but it was obvious she didn’t like that she had to rely on him to buy her dinner. Honestly, he felt a little like he still owed her a lot, somehow stealing her child outweighed everything she’d ever done to him. It was weird to feel like she should be making some sort of effort to get back at him and that he should be letting her.

She wasn’t though and that left him with the feeling of being off balance, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

‘Thank you for dinner,’ she said once they were outside and climbing back into his car.

Nick shrugged. ‘It’s no problem.’

‘No,’ she contradicted. ‘It’s actually really weird. This should feel weird, right?’

‘Yes.’ Nick felt he could not place nearly enough emphasis on that word to accurately convey just how weird this should have been.

‘But it doesn’t, right? That’s not just me?’

‘It’s not just you.’

‘Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel better.’

Nick snorted and put the car in gear. He hadn’t realised how late it had gotten but the streets on the drive back to Adalind’s motel were quiet. So were they, they’d talked a lot at dinner and so the silence wasn’t uncomfortable, it was heavy, but that was the weight of the knowledge that whatever the hell they were doing wasn’t nearly as weird as it should have been.

He turned into the parking lot of the motel and Adalind grabbed his arm suddenly. ‘Nick!’ she hissed.

The door to her motel room was open. It wasn’t much, not enough to draw attention, but enough that Adalind, who had reason to be on guard, had noticed it immediately. Nick drove passed her door and parked at the other end of the lot. For a minute all they did was sit in the darkened car and watch Adalind’s room, looking for any sign someone was still there.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Adalind murmured. ‘Do you think they’re still in there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Great.’ Adalind took a deep breath and cracked open her door. ‘Well, let’s go find out.’

It wasn’t like they had any other choice and so Nick grabbed the keys from the ignition and got out to follow her. When they got close to the door, Adalind fell back behind him and he drew his gun. He paused to listen by the door, ears straining to hear any sounds of movement, any sign there was someone waiting for Adalind to return.

He could make out the sounds of two people breathing. They must have been standing right by the door for him to pick out the sound so clearly. He held up two fingers and Adalind nodded. She didn’t look scared, mostly she just looked annoyed. He wondered how many times since he’d last seen her she’d had to switch motels.

Nick took a deep breath and pushed the door open; jerking back and away from any attack the two in the room might have thrown. He heard movement and moved accordingly, darting into the room and driving a kick right into the chest of a skalengeck that had the wesen stumbling back into the motel room. Behind him, Adalind came in, using the element of surprise to knock the second skalengeck back into the room.

‘Stay down,’ Nick snapped, but the first skalengeck wasn’t listening. He shoved to his feet and launched at Nick. The attack pushed Nick back into the window and he struggled to keep hold of his weapon while he fended off the attack. He couldn’t see what Adalind was doing but he could hear her stumbling around and things breaking. He definitely saw a glass fly through the air.

He kicked the skalengeck in the knee and jabbed a fist into his ribs, pushing him back, he got his gun up again but the second skalengeck came out of nowhere and tore it from his hand. The first got his hands around Nick’s neck and for a moment all he could do was struggle to breathe. Then Adalind was there, he didn’t see what she used but the skalengeck holding him jerked bodily and then slumped to the floor.

Nick didn’t have time to glance down, the second skalengeck made another grab for him. Nick duck and charged, ramming his shoulder into the guy’s middle. The skalengeck was strong, though, and he managed to move with Nick, angling his body to absorb the tackle and twisting clear as soon as he could. Nick recovered quickly, driving his fist into the man’s neck. He missed and received a solid knee to the stomach.

He scrambled around and swung another punch, this one landed solidly against the skalengeck’s jaw. He jerked back from the blow and then stiffened, eyes going wide before he slumped forward to reveal Adalind standing behind him, eyes fierce with a bloody knife held in her right hand.

‘Thanks,’ he coughed, throat a little sore from being choked. It wasn’t bad, he probably wouldn’t have any bruises at all, which was likely a good thing because he had no idea how he’d have explained those marks to Juliette.

‘They’re not Verrat,’ Adalind observed. ‘That’s different.’

‘How many times have you switched motels?’

‘Five,’ Adalind admitted. ‘I don’t know that I’ll be able to try another. They keep finding me.’

Nick looked around. The room was trashed. The two skalengeck’s had tossed the place before they’d returned, though what they were looking for was anyone’s guess. They could have been looking for clues to Diana’s whereabouts or just there to kill Adalind. It wasn’t like she didn’t have enemies. It also wasn’t just the Royals who would love to get their hands on Diana. He was sure there were a lot of factions he didn’t even know about that would like to have that kind of power under their control.

‘Did you check in under your own name?’

She gave him a look that told him all he needed to know about that question.

‘We’ll leave the bodies. Security?’

‘None,’ Adalind told him. ‘Two cameras on the parking lot that don’t work and the one that’s supposed to cover the office is turned the wrong way. No businesses across the road that have a view of this room or the lot. I checked.’

He was glad of that but it still left him uneasy leaving the bodies for someone to find. ‘We need to make it look like you checked out before they got here.’

‘I doubt they’ll notice if I just disappear,’ Adalind said to his relief. ‘I chose this place for a reason. We just need to get my things without disturbing the mess.’

Nick smiled wryly, ‘Somehow I doubt that will be hard.’

Adalind didn’t have much, a few changes of clothes, some items in the bathroom and that was it. It didn’t take them long at all to pack and once they were finished Nick quickly went through the men’s pockets. He didn’t find any ID, no cash or cards, not even a set of car keys that could help him identify them. That probably worked in their favour though it didn’t tell them why they’d come looking for Adalind or who had sent them. He assumed they hadn’t come on their own.

Back in the safety of his Land Cruiser, Adalind finally voiced the question he’d been thinking on since they’d started packing up her few possessions. ‘Where am I going to go? I can’t keep running, I won’t.’

If he were honest, he’d known exactly where he was going to take her from the moment he’d realised she couldn’t stay in that room. It had just taken her voicing the question to make him acknowledge it. He’d bought the loft for himself and the eventuality that his home was no longer safe. He hadn’t brought it intending to house a woman he’d spent the majority of the last three years hating.

That didn’t stop him from driving back to the loft. ‘I’ve got a safe place you can go,’ was all he told her.


	4. Chapter 3

Letting Adalind stay in the loft had seemed great in theory (on the tail of killing a couple of skalengecks and such a nice dinner) but in reality it was a logistical nightmare that found him carless at a coffee shop a block over from the station waiting on an order of coffee to take with him to work.

It kind of voided the safety of a safe house if you kept calling a cab to come and get you and because the only way Adalind was going to be able to afford anything of her own was to actually work, he’d ended up picking her up Friday, she’d dropped him off a block from the station and borrowed his car for the day. He was pretty sure he’d lost his sanity that morning they had sex (twice!). That was the only explanation for how this stuff just kept happening.

He thought about giving her Marie’s old car but selling it for the cash would serve him better in the long run and so he figured, if his car was just going to sit in the parking garage at work all day it may as well be of some use to Adalind. She didn’t just need to stop by her new job, she needed to fill the fridge in the loft and buy actual bed linens because he hadn’t actually gotten that far before their strange little dinner.

As long as he focused on work he wouldn’t have to think about the fact that he’d given her all of the cash he’d had hidden in the back of his closet in his gun safe. He’d justified that little moment of insanity by reminding himself that anything she bought would be for his loft and so he would sure as hell be keeping it when she finally got her own place.

See, if he looked at it that way then he didn’t have to feel like he had completely lost his grasp on his sanity.

Luckily, they had a case to solve, unluckily it involved a woman who seemed to be losing her mind. Nick was not unaware of the irony. Still, solving the crime and learning that the woman’s husband was a triplet and intentionally causing her to lose her mind kept him nicely entrenched in work so he only had to think about Adalind once over the entire weekend and that was when she collected him from work and they exchanged a very awkward conversation about the things she’d bought for the loft.

Funny how even though it was still his loft, he didn’t much care what she did with it as long as he didn’t have to hear about it and no one found out where it was. At least it didn’t sound like she’d bought much, just some basic necessities to see her through until her own pay started to come through.

‘I’m going to have to buy a car before anything else,’ she pointed out with some annoyance as he pulled the Land Cruiser into the garage of the loft. ‘I can’t keep borrowing yours.’

Buying a car also sounded great in theory but it was going to cost a bit more than she could really afford to spend and, because that was the kind of thing he thought about around her, she was going to need something reliable with some decent safety features just in case one of the people after her tried to run her off the road.

It was why he said, ‘You can use the loft as long as you like,’ before he could stop himself.

The words tasted bitter on his tongue and something of that must have shown on his face because Adalind laughed at him. He’d known Adalind for years, that might have been true, but the entire time they’d known each other (excluding the last month or so) they’d been trying to kill each other. This whole being nice thing made his skin crawl but he couldn’t seem to help it. It was like something in him was reacting to something in her and he was helpless to stop it.

If he didn’t think she was experiencing the same thing, he might have accused her of using another love spell on him.

Unfortunately, it seemed as though he had no one to blame for his weird behaviour but himself.

‘I’ll pick you up for work on Monday and you can have the car again.’

He considered it a weird sort of victory that he reigned in the urge to follow her into the elevator and up to the loft. He didn’t even know where that goddamn urge was coming from. He’d managed to ignore it and gone home to have dinner with Juliette and Trubel.

His weekend had been blissfully Adalind free even if it had been full of work and wesen weirdness but then Monday rolled around and he left the house much earlier than he usually would have to pick up Adalind. If he stopped for coffee on the way it was only because he wanted some. He didn’t even realise he’d bought a second one until he’d already paid and was walking away from the barista.

So, interesting question, when had he learned Adalind’s coffee preference? The idea that the few hours they’d spent together had been enough that he’d picked up on that little fact made him want to throw up. He’d just blame it on his excellent observational skills and his training as a detective.

Adalind smiled in surprise when he handed her the to-go cup and he refused to acknowledge the weird feeling he got when she did. He coughed to clear the awkwardness and asked her if she was nervous about her first day.

She shrugged and sipped her coffee. She was dressed much more casually than he’d ever seen her at work before but he supposed there wasn’t much call for Armani on a college campus. That wasn’t to say she didn’t look nice. She was wearing lighter coloured jeans this time with an oversized white button down shirt and a pale grey sweater.

Not that he noticed. His eyes were definitely focused forward on the road. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him?

There was no silence in the car this time, she asked him about his weekend and he ended up telling her all about the triplets and their plan to steal the family fortune. Her weekend hadn’t been nearly as enjoyable, that was how she put it. She actually used the word enjoyable to describe hunting down wesen and solving the crime.

Somewhere very deep inside of him a little bit more of the hatred he felt for her evaporated. It was so much easier to hate Adalind when she wasn’t a person, just the angry hexenbiest fighting against him. The more time he spent with her, the more he was realising that the woman he’d been dealing with all those years only really came out to play when she felt threatened or wanted something.

‘The guy who had the job before me left things a complete mess,’ she informed him. ‘I spent the whole weekend trying to make sense of his projects, emailing back and forth between the different professors and some of the grad students trying to sort out what he was working on and why.’

‘Did you sort it out?’

‘Of course,’ Adalind answered. ‘I don’t know why he’d turned it into such a mess, it’s really not that hard to follow. Basically I answer to the head of the Law Department but I’ll also be working with all of the faculty, just essentially picking up the slack, helping with research and fact checking and grading papers. I might be able to pick up some other things once I’ve established myself.’

Nick had no trouble imaging Adalind running the department if she set her mind to it. ‘You like the work so far?’

‘It’s different,’ she said once again. ‘Sometimes different is good.’

He didn’t know why, but those words stuck with him and he found himself thinking on them at the strangest times. Like when he and Juliette were sitting down and watching television, just relaxing after work and spending time with each other. He’d tried to have a conversation with her about their future but every time he tried to bring it up, every time he tried to test the waters to see if she was ready to take that next step, something came up.

The first time, it had been Juliette who’d gotten called away. She was the vet on call and a dog had been brought in suffering from two broken legs and a possible spinal injury after being hit by a car. The second time, it had been Trubel who’d interrupted their conversation wanting to ask him a million and one questions about his encounters with the Verrat.

The third time both Juliette and Trubel had gotten involved in one of his cases (he actually wasn’t clear how that had happened, only that it had) and so he was beginning to think they’d never get the chance to talk. He could have proposed without talking about it first but he got the feeling Juliette would have a dozen reasons why getting married just then was a bad idea.

He’d never felt so insecure in his relationship with her before and he really didn’t like it. It didn’t help that he was keeping so much from her, from all of his friends. He hadn’t told anyone that Adalind was still in town, hadn’t told them he was letting her live in his loft (which he hadn’t told them about buying). He didn’t even know how to begin telling them about having dinner with her, lending her his car or all of the times they’d had coffee and talked on the drive to work.

He really had no idea how he would even begin to explain what happened between them on the day of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding. It kind of felt like the time to tell anyone had passed and now if he even tried it would be a lot harder to convince everyone it had genuinely been a mistake and that he hadn’t known who he was sleeping with (the first time).

When Monroe and Rosalee had their front lawn set alight in the sign of the wesenrien something in his relationship with Juliette shifted.

It took them a while to put the fire out and assure the cops who responded to a neighbour’s call that they had it all under control. By the time they got home they were both pretty ready to just crawl right into bed. It bothered Nick that his friends were being persecuted for being in love but he could also just view it as another annoyance of being a Grimm. His days were always filled with this kind of thing and while it didn’t normally touch so close to home – and he sure as hell was angry about that – in a resigned way it was just another day.

He was most of the way to being asleep when Juliette started talking to him. ‘Do you ever think about what it would be like if you’d never become a Grimm?’

He rolled onto his side so he was looking at her and frowned. She was sitting up in bed, the lamp still on, staring off into the distance as she considered her words. ‘What?’ he asked, confused by the sudden question.

‘Do you ever think about it?’

He wanted to say yes, of course he did, but thinking about it and wanting it were two very different things and he got the feeling that was what Juliette was really asking. ‘I guess.’

It wasn’t much of an answer, he hadn’t intended it to be, he was hoping it would prompt her to say what she really wanted to say. And it did, in a way. ‘I think about it all the time.’

She said it like it was a confession, like he didn’t already know that some days she hated what he was. He’d seen it at Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding but at the time he’d been a little preoccupied with thoughts of Adalind (and whether or not he should have just killed her) to pay as much attention to Juliette as he probably should have. That didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed the way she looked at Rosalee, the sadness that lurked behind the near-blinding happiness. Just because he’d been too preoccupied to say anything, to ask her about it, didn’t mean he didn’t know that she was thinking about their own future, their own possible wedding.

Unfortunately, thinking about the sex you’d just had with your enemy just wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in for that kind of conversation.

‘Do you think we’d be married now?’ she asked. ‘If you hadn’t become a Grimm?’

The truth was he did think they’d be married and probably happily so and that didn’t sit as easily as it once would have. If he’d never become a Grimm would he have even known his aunt was dead? Would his mother ever have felt the need to return to Portland? What would have happened to all of his wesen cases? The ones where he’d had to use his Grimm nature to push confessions, the ones where that was the only reason he’d known where to look for the culprit?

What about Monroe? If he’d never met Nick, never gotten involved in his work would he have ever met Rosalee? Or would he have wound up back with the terrible influence that was Angelina? What about Hank? Wu? What about, and he couldn’t believe she was even a factor here, but what about Adalind? Would she still be the lawyer wearing designer suits and making lots of money? Or would she have seen the truth about her mother and Renard and had no way of getting out?

It was easy for Juliette to imagine what their life would be like without wesen but he couldn’t. Whenever he thought about their future together his being a Grimm didn’t change. He’d had the chance to be normal and he hadn’t taken it. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to tell Juliette that now, not if she was thinking about what it would have been like to be normal.

The hardest thing, though, was knowing that Juliette could still have that normal life. The only thing tying her to the wesen world was her relationship with him. Yes, she was friends with Rosalee and Monroe, but if she really wanted to cut ties with wesen she could. He was the only thing holding her back and more and more often these days he was wondering why.

Was it worth it? Was it worth seeing the look of disappointment on her face when he cancelled another dinner or called to say he wouldn’t be home because he and Hank were setting off into the forest with Monroe to track down something deadly? She helped out as much as she could but did she feel like she couldn’t be any help those times when he, Monroe and Rosalee went off to deal with the more dangerous wesen?

He wanted to ask her all of those questions but he couldn’t, all he could do was answer her honestly and see where the conversation went from there.

‘Yeah, I think we would be.’

‘And we’d be happy,’ Juliette told him. ‘We’d be going to parties and dinner with friends, maybe we’d even be thinking about starting a family.’

Juliette had always been the more social of the two of them, it hadn’t occurred to him until she mentioned it but they didn’t do any of those things any more. Sure, most of those dinners and parties were with her friends but he’d always got along well with them, managing to find someone to fill the time with at those things. He didn’t miss those parties. He didn’t miss the dinners.

He didn’t miss normal.

Juliette so obviously did. He didn’t see why they couldn’t have those things now, not really. There was no reason why they couldn’t still get married, still start a family. It wasn’t like he’d had the safest job before. He worked robbery homicide (homicide more often than not these days) and that carried risks just as much as his work as a Grimm did. He didn’t dare ask if she’d thought of things that way, it really wasn’t the time to be poking holes in her fantasy.

‘We could still have that,’ he ventured, sounding more hesitant than he’d really meant to. He loved her but he didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t have those things. He didn’t want to hold her back from something else that might fit better with how she saw her future.

He was never going to be that normal guy, not the one he’d been when they’d met.

‘I don’t know that I want to bring children into a world where even your own home isn’t safe. Do you think Monroe and Rosalee will ever be able to have children? Do you think it’ll ever be safe for them?’

They’d talked about kids once before, a long time ago, when they were first getting serious and testing the waters to see what they each wanted in the future. They’d both wanted kids – Nick still did – but if Juliette was having doubts, if she thought his life was too dangerous for kids to be an option, then did they even still want the same things?

Nick’s life was never going to be normal, it was never going to be as safe as those first years with Juliette, but he wouldn’t let that stop him from having the life he wanted. He knew it wouldn’t stop Monroe and Rosalee and they were the ones being persecuted for loving each other.

Juliette didn’t seem to want an answer, she seemed to think she knew what he would say. ‘It’ll never be safe, for them or for us.’

She turned off the lamp and slipped down, turning onto her side and facing away from him. He’d been tired when they first climbed into bed but now he was wide awake. She may not have been aware of it, but Juliette had just placed the first proper wedge between them.

He’d like to think it wasn’t a conscious choice, to be out of the house before she woke the next morning, but after struggling to fall asleep he’d found it easier to be up and out of the house than to face her. He drove by Monroe and Rosalee’s to check on them, stopping only briefly to check in with the cop parked out front before he kept driving.

He arrived at the loft a lot earlier than he usually did and so instead of just waiting in the car, he parked in the garage and rode the elevator up. Adalind was standing in the kitchen when he slid the grate up, still in her pyjamas with her hair falling untidily out of the knot she’d put it in. She was in the middle of pouring coffee into a mug and she reached for a second when she saw him. She didn’t look surprised to see him, his arrival would have shown up on the security monitors he’d installed, she just seemed surprised to see him so early.

‘Hey,’ she greeted, walking out from behind the counter to meet him halfway and offering him one of the mugs. ‘Why so early?’

He was perfectly honest when he told her, ‘I didn’t want to be at home.’

She raised an enquiring brow but he wasn’t in the mood to talk about his and Juliette’s relationship issues. Especially not with Adalind of all people, he still didn’t know what this was they were doing but even if it felt suspiciously like they were becoming friends he wasn’t ready to have that kind of conversation with her. Even if she’d probably be able to offer him a different perspective.

Instead he told her about the attacks on Monroe and Rosalee. Adalind didn’t much care about his friends (that whole helping kidnap Diana thing being a sore point) but she was unhappy to hear they were being threatened by bigoted idiots who should know better than that. He noticed she wasn’t surprised, though.

While they talked, Nick found himself searching the fridge for something to have for breakfast. He’d left the house without grabbing anything and he was starting to realise he was actually starving. Adalind didn’t really have any food in her fridge.

‘I haven’t been to the grocery store yet.’

Nick shrugged. ‘Let’s go out for breakfast.’

Adalind gave him a searching look over the top of her coffee before she nodded. ‘I just need a quick shower. Give me twenty minutes.’

He nodded and while she disappeared into the bathroom (coffee mug still in hand) he wandered around looking at all of the changes she’d been making. When he’d first brought her into the loft she’d looked around it with disdain but she’d understood the necessity of being somewhere hard to find as she was sick and tired of constantly switching motels. Weeks ago it had been an empty shell with nothing but a bare mattress and an empty chest of drawers.

Now though, there were signs the loft was someone’s home. There was a dark coloured duvet with light sheets on the bed, a nightstand with a single lamp where Adalind had stacked a number of legal books and a single paperback that came from the campus library. There wasn’t any artwork on the walls, no little knickknacks scattered about the place but the furniture was enough. Some of it he’d helped her empty out of her storage locker and he knew she’d sold a lot of what she didn’t want from there to pay for things she needed.

Adalind had done a good job with what little she’d had to work with to make the loft feel like a home. The small kitchen table seemed to be functioning as a desk because it was scattered with papers and notes, highlighters and different coloured pens. On one of the chairs was a stack of papers she was in the middle of grading.

A brand new laptop sat in amongst the mess with a post-it note stuck to the top with an address written on it.

‘I think I’ve found a car,’ she told him, and he spun around to see she’d come out of the bathroom and noticed where he was looking. She was only wearing a towel but she’d brushed out her hair and her make-up was done. She still had the mug of coffee in her hand. ‘It’s a little more expensive than I wanted to spend but I think it’ll be worth it.’

He nodded and she disappeared into the bedroom to get dressed. He took note of the address to check out when he got in to work. Maybe it was just the cop in him but he wanted to make sure the seller was legit before Adalind went there.

The idea that he was worried about her didn’t sit as uncomfortably as it once had.

The fact that he spent the rest of the day thinking about her in that towel was so normal by this point he just went with it. It actually proved to be a nice break from worrying about Monroe and Rosalee. Or the conversation with Juliette he was dreading happening when he got home.

It didn’t happen, though, despite walking out of the house before she was even up, and thereby avoiding any rehashing of the previous night’s future crushing conversation, Juliette didn’t bring it up. He walked into the house expecting tension and things to be awkward and instead it was perfectly normal. She asked him about his day and then she and Trubel started debating what reason wesen could have for kidnapping couples.

Trubel seemed to be on edge about something but didn’t want to talk about it but Juliette was fine. It put him on edge because he didn’t understand how she could have such an important conversation and then just act as though it hadn’t happened. He didn’t know if he was hurt or angry at her for carelessly tossing aside the future he wanted to have with her because she didn’t think it was going to be safe.

Did she even realise she’d told him that if they stayed together he could never have that family he wanted? Did she even realise the importance of the conversation she’d wanted to have when he was half asleep and worried about their friends? Did it not occur to her that any thought he might have had about proposing again had shrivelled up and died?

The more he thought about it that night, the more he realised he was angry with her. Since she’d learned the truth about what he was he had hidden nothing from her (he wasn’t counting Adalind because that whole thing had started after Juliette started pulling away – sort of). He’d made sure she knew where he was, what he was doing and always made the effort to include her when he could. He could admit that sometimes she included herself when he’d much prefer she stayed home where it was safe.

By the time they went up to bed, he’d worked himself up to the point where he didn’t think crawling into bed beside her was a good idea. He didn’t want to say something he’d regret but he didn’t know how to avoid joining her without bringing it all up again and he was too annoyed to have a rational conversation with her.

He climbed into bed beside her anyway and after lying in the dark for thirty minutes staring at the ceiling he got up again. He wished he could talk to Monroe about all of this but his friend had his own problems. He didn’t think his reality check really compared to having his life, and that of the woman he loved, being threatened just because of that love.

He thought about talking to Hank, his partner probably had some useful advice given how many times he’d been married but that wasn’t the kind of advice Nick needed. Hank could tell him all the pitfalls of being married to a cop and how the hours could affect things but Nick really just wanted someone to listen and then offer him advice that wasn’t tinged with three somewhat bitter divorces.

He went downstairs and called Adalind. He hung up immediately after but the fact was he’d done it. He’d wanted someone to talk to, someone who would understand where he was coming from, and so he’d called Adalind. It didn’t matter that he’d hung up before the call could even go through, it mattered that apparently she was someone he felt he could go to.

How the hell had that happened?

Logically, he knew that in this situation Adalind was uniquely qualified to give advice as she had brought a child into this dangerous world. And look how well that had turned out. It wasn’t the strongest argument for bringing children into his dangerous world but it wasn’t like any future children he and Juliette had would be super powered hexenbiests the Royal family would fight over.

There was a good chance any kids they had wouldn’t even be Grimms.

Sure, Adalind’s reasons for going through with her pregnancy were actually incredibly selfish but that didn’t change the fact that she loved her daughter and wanted nothing more than to see her safe and loved.

That was what he wanted for his children. Yes, he lived a dangerous life but he was taking steps to make sure those dangers never followed him home. Wasn’t that the whole point of buying the loft? Of moving the trailer into the woods?

He thought about what Adalind would tell him and then considered why it mattered. His history with Adalind was a mess of what should have been unforgiveable acts but when she’d needed help she’d called him. He could have ignored her plea for help, he probably should have, but even though she had no way of knowing if he’d come she’d still called him.

They’d talked about a lot of things since they’d started carpooling – and that was just a weird thing of its own – so Nick felt like he had a better understanding of why Adalind had done the things she’d done. The first time they’d properly met, when he was protecting her during that case, others (namely Renard) were already dictating her actions.

The first time he’d ever seen her, coming out of that coffee shop, she’d scared the hell out of him. He’d never seen anyone woge before and he’d thought maybe he was seeing things. He’d scared her too; he knew that now, even if it hadn’t been noticeable later when she snuck into his aunt’s hospital room to kill her. He knew why she’d done that now, too. It didn’t excuse her actions, she could have said no, could have told Renard to go to hell, but she hadn’t because she hadn’t cared about him or his aunt and she’d loved Renard.

Thinking about that made Nick feel slightly sick because the more he’d gotten to know Adalind the angrier he felt at his Captain for using her like that. He had no illusions that Renard had loved Adalind at the time, you don’t turn around and sleep with someone’s mother if you love them.

Then again, you don’t sleep with the man your daughter loves either.

Adalind didn’t exactly have a great support network and so he understood why she’d tried to kill his aunt and he grudgingly understood why she’d done what she did to Hank. He didn’t like it, didn’t like that she was capable of such cold-hearted murder but he couldn’t argue that his own act of stripping her of her powers hadn’t been just as horrible.

After all, the fact that he had stripped her of the hexenbiest was what had stripped her of what little family she had. Her mother and Renard wanted nothing to do with her once she was no longer any use to them. They’d cast her aside like she was garbage; he understood how that could drive someone to do something like Adalind had eventually done to Juliette. He’d have wanted revenge too if that had been him. To do everything you were asked out of love and then to have that love tossed back in your face had to hurt.

He could relate. Those months while Juliette was struggling to remember him, while she was struggling with feelings for Renard, had left him feeling like that.

Adalind had gotten her revenge and then gone looking for someone who might appreciate what she had to offer; she’d essentially gone over Renard’s head to a Royal with actual influence. He understood her reasoning even if he didn’t think he’d have done the same thing. He’d grown up with loving parents and then a loving aunt, his life may not have been conventional but he’d been taught to love not manipulate as Adalind had been.

He couldn’t imagine how horrible it must have felt, growing up with the knowledge that your own mother viewed you as a tool, something to shape and craft to be useful but not loved and cherished as a child should be.

He imagined being home schooled had only made it worse. Not only had she been on her own at home a great deal of the time but she’d had to do a lot of that learning on her own without the support of friends her own age.

He didn’t hate her anymore. It wasn’t a comfortable realisation because if he didn’t hate her then he had to own up to the realisation that he actually liked her. The woman she was around him, without the pressure of the Royals or the Resistance, without Renard pushing her to make moves, was smart, funny, intelligent and she understood what it meant to be wesen, understood what it meant to be a Grimm.

He gave in and called her.


	5. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos! I'm going to start throwing up new chapters daily until I'm up to date with what I've got, then the plan is to update every Tuesday, nice and regular to keep me motivated to actually write.

‘Nick?’ Adalind sounded strangely far away and her voice seemed to be filled with concern. ‘Nick are you okay?’

He shook his head, not because he wasn’t okay but because there was a ringing in his ears now and he could barely hear her. He tried to sit up and in doing so realised he was flat on his back on the forest floor staring up into Adalind’s amused face. Wait, hadn’t she sounded concerned a moment ago?

‘I hurt all over,’ he announced, accepting the hand she offered him and struggling to his feet.

‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ Adalind rolled her eyes.

‘You mean more dramatic than the guy we both thought was dead launching out of his grave to attack me?’

‘Exactly.’

‘He’s definitely dead this time, right?’

Adalind bent down and picked something up from the ground at their feet. It was a severed head and she was holding it by the hair with a look of disgust on her face. ‘Yeah, I’d say he’s definitely dead.’

Nick snorted, he couldn’t help himself. Adalind tossed the head aside and she and Nick shoved the body into the grave he’d just finished digging. Why was it that he and Adalind kept ending up in the woods burying bodies? He didn’t even have the excuse this time that it was Adalind’s fault, this particular wesen, a reaper, had been after him, Adalind just happened to be with him at the time.

Of course, the fact that he’d been jumped in the parking lot of a grocery store was embarrassing enough, the fact that Adalind had been the one to save him just made it worse. Or maybe it made it better? He supposed they were kind of even now. And at least this time she had her own shovel and was helping him bury the evidence they’d just killed someone else.

They buried the head separately, for no other reason than to ensure that it didn’t somehow reattach itself and prove once again they’d been mistaken thinking the guy was dead. It didn’t actually seem likely but Nick was in that kind of mood.

He scooped up both shovels and one of the flashlights and carefully moved the beam of the flashlight around the grave to make sure they hadn’t left behind anything that might connect them should anyone discover the body. The light flashed off the blade of the reaper’s scythe and Adalind scooped down to pick it up. She gave it a few test swings and pulled a face.

‘What do you want to do with this?’

‘I’m starting a collection,’ he joked, though he supposed it was true, he had a few blades stored in the trailer now, why not add one more? It was sort of like a trophy collection, telling his future ancestors how many reapers he’d beaten. ‘We’ll stop by the trailer, it’s not too far from here.’

Adalind’s brows shot up in surprise, it looked weird given how the flashlight cast shadows across her face. ‘You mean I’ll get to see your Aunt Marie’s infamous trailer?’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘I know,’ he told her, ‘I can’t believe I just suggested it either.’

‘But Nick,’ Adalind gasped, clutching the hand holding her flashlight to her chest in an overly dramatic fashion. ‘Are you saying you trust me?’

‘I’m saying that’s where I keep all the poisons I’ve always wanted to use on you.’

‘You trust me!’ Adalind gloated.

‘I never said that,’ he muttered, turning to lead the way back to his car.

‘You do,’ Adalind fired back gleefully, hurrying to catch up with him. ‘You trust me. Nick Burkhardt trusts me!’

‘Don’t make me kill you too,’ Nick snapped. ‘I’ve already buried one body tonight; I’m not opposed to burying another.’

Amused, Adalind practically skipped beside him. She was getting a serious kick out of teasing him. ‘Wait,’ she grinned. ‘Does this mean you like me?’

‘No!’ he assured her.

‘You do!’ she laughed, darting in front of him so she could look at him as she walked backwards along the path.

He wondered if it was too much to ask for that she trip and accidentally behead herself on the way down. Probably.

‘I tolerate your existence,’ Nick explained.

‘Ha!’ she cried, grin so wide it threatened to split her whole face in two. ‘You just keep telling yourself that! I’ve grown on you, admit it.’

‘Yeah,’ Nick told her, ‘like a fungal infection I can’t get rid of.’

‘I’m way more charming than a fungal infection,’ she laughed. ‘I’m -’ she broke off, a horrified look suddenly filling her features. She stopped walking and he reached out a hand to her in alarm, worried that if he turned around he’d either find a headless corpse bearing down on them or an innocent bystander ready to call the cops.

‘What?’

‘I just realised something,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I trust you,’ Adalind sounded positively horrified by the revelation. ‘I like you.’ Hastily, she held the reapers scythe out to him. ‘Quick! Try and kill me.’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Now who’s being dramatic?’

Adalind shrugged. ‘If I don’t make light of this situation then I remember that someone just tried to kill us, you stole my daughter away from me and Viktor is sending people to kill me since I failed to meet the terms of our deal.’

Nick frowned. ‘Can he really even claim that as a betrayal if he never even had Diana?’

‘That’s what you’re choosing to question?’ Adalind sounded annoyed.

‘Well, sending Diana away has kept her safe.’

Adalind turned her back on him and started walking toward the car again. ‘You still stole my daughter from me, Nick.’

Just because he felt a certain amount of guilt for doing it, didn’t mean he was about to apologise for the reasons he took her. Diana was safer with his mother than she likely would have been with Adalind. At least, that was the case if Adalind was still determined to keep her daughter apart from the Royals. Something she really should have thought about before she’d tried to sell her own child for power.

Didn’t that make her exactly like her mother? He wisely didn’t mention that; he’d gotten to know Adalind well enough over the last few weeks to know that bringing that up was an invitation for a beheading. As she was currently holding a very sharp and lethal reaper scythe, he thought it best not to test her.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t send you with them,’ was the closest to an apology he could get.

She didn’t react to his words; made no sign she’d heard him but he knew there was no way she could have missed his words. He didn’t blame her. Some days, she hated what had happened, other times, she could see the good intentions behind their actions. It didn’t mean she liked it, didn’t mean she’d totally forgiven him for taking away her daughter.

Understanding wasn’t forgiveness but he knew she was getting there. One day, she’d forgive him, and when that day came maybe he’d have earned it.

‘Have you heard from Kelly?’ Adalind broke the quiet.

‘Not since the last email I showed you.’

Adalind nodded, she still hadn’t turned to look at him and was resolutely walking ahead of him. Sometimes, when they were together, it was easy to forget how much they’d hurt each other in the past. When they were talking about work and other random things it was so easy but then something would happen, something that reminded them they weren’t friends, not really, and things would be hard again.

It was weird. Adalind wasn’t wrong, sometimes, when he wasn’t really thinking about it, about all the times they’d hurt each other, it was easy to trust her. Easy to remember that since they’d started this weird almost friendship, she’d saved his life just as many times as he’d saved hers. He did trust her, he didn’t exactly like to think about it, but it was easy to trust her because he knew why she did the things she did. They weren’t necessarily nice things but there was a reason for everything she did.

When she’d tried to kill his aunt it had been to win Renard’s favour and his love. It was the same reason she’d drugged Hank and left him for dead. Perhaps if he’d treated her like an actual person instead of being so wary and rude to her he could have prevented what had happened between them. It was just really hard to look beyond the fact that she’d snuck into Marie’s hospital room and tried to kill his aunt just because Renard had asked (ordered?) her to.

What kind of person killed someone in cold blood for love? Actually, these days he worried he understood that all too well. He’d killed more people since he’d become a Grimm than he’d ever have thought possible and it hadn’t been as hard as it should have been. He’d done it out of self-defence every time but there was still an ease to it that didn’t sit well with him.

Maybe it was being a Grimm, maybe he was just wired differently, but did that really make him any better than Adalind? She’d had her reasons for trying to kill Hank and Aunt Marie, he hadn’t agreed with them – mostly because he loved and cared for them – but that didn’t mean he hadn’t done the same thing to someone else.

What if the reaper they’d just killed had a family? One who loved him and waited anxiously at home for him to come back safe. Had he just made an enemy of a family of reapers purely because they were following orders – or instinct?

It wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

‘Does Sean ask about her?’

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t deserve her.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Then again, after what I did, I probably don’t deserve her either.’

It surprised Nick that he wanted to offer words of comfort, that he wanted to reassure her that she did deserve her daughter but realistically, she hadn’t even wanted Diana until she was born and before that she’d been attempting to sell her to the highest bidder in exchange for getting her powers back.

Was it really any wonder things had turned out the way they had?

Which was a really horrible thing to think and something he really hoped Adalind never considered. The idea that this was some sort of karmic payback for the way she had treated her daughter (like a hot commodity and not something that should be loved and cherished) would have hurt her deeply.

He was surprised to find he cared. God, he really did like her. He hoped she never realised she’d been teasing him with the truth, she’d be intolerable if she realised that after all of this time he really had gotten over most of his hatred and come to like spending time with her.

It had to be all that time trapped in the car with her. There was just no other explanation. Why else would he have turned to her when he’d had that not-quite-fight with Juliette?

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Nick offered softly. ‘You love Diana, you’d do anything for her, everybody deserves to have that.’

‘You didn’t think so.’

Nick sighed. ‘I’m not proud of what I did.’

‘I know.’ Adalind sounded resentful.

‘And I wouldn’t do it again, not the same way, not without giving you some way of going with her.’

‘That’s only because you like me now.’

‘Adalind.’ Nick reached out and grabbed her arm, tugging her to a stop and spinning her to face him. ‘You’re right, I do know you now and that’s how I know that I wouldn’t do that again.’

Adalind looked up at him, eyes boring into him as she tried to read his thoughts, to believe what he was saying. He hoped his expression told her what she wanted to know because he had no idea what it was she wanted from him. It wasn’t an apology, he’d given her one before (not as heartfelt as one might have been now) and he’d told her of his regrets, he wasn’t sure what else he wanted his expression to tell her.

‘I want to believe you,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve done so much for me that I want to believe you but I’m afraid one day I’m going to wake up and you’ll have realised how ridiculous this whole thing is and I’ll never see Diana again, never even hear how she’s doing.’

He felt like an ass. It wasn’t like he hadn’t already been feeling guilty but hearing her talk about how afraid she was to never have contact with Diana again made him feel worse. ‘We aren’t the same people we were before. I’m not the Grimm looking for revenge over Juliette or Hank and you’re not the hexenbiest following orders. We’re not those people anymore and, yeah, this is weird, whatever this thing between us is, but it’s not just going to go away. I’m not just going to stop helping you because I suddenly remember what you are. Are you going to try and kill me again? Are you going to wake up one morning and decide that instead of a ride to work you’d much rather kill me?’

Adalind scoffed. ‘What would be the point?’

‘We’re not those people anymore Adalind, I think these past few weeks have proved that.’

‘That’s just it, Nick, it’s been weeks, we should be trying to kill each other not playing at being friends.’

‘I have no explanation for this,’ he said honestly. ‘But you made the choice to come to me. You made the choice to help me get my powers back, to stay in town so you could keep in touch with Diana through me. You’re the one that called me for help.’

‘I called you because I knew you’d help me. You’re a good man, Nick, I was relying on that.’

‘I know.’ And he did, he had no doubt the reason she’d called him above anyone else was because she knew he wouldn’t be able to let her die when there was something he could do to prevent it. He joked a lot about wanting her dead but the truth was he couldn’t kill her now, not like this, not after they’d spent so much time together.

‘Are you really going to take me to the trailer?’

‘It’s against my better judgement but yeah, I don’t think you’ll abuse your knowledge.’

‘Ha!’ Adalind smirked, mood brightening suddenly. ‘Never know when I’ll need a couple of reaper scythes or some poison.’ She turned again and started once more toward the car.

Nick shook his head. Her moods were so hard to keep track of. One minute she wanted to kill him, the next she was laughing and joking, then she was quiet and sad, it was hard to keep up. She was working through something, though, much like he was. She’d come to him for help, and though she’d only really been looking for someone to save her life, she’d found something much more. He didn’t want to label what they were building a friendship – the thought alone made him queasy – but he wasn’t sure what else to call it.

And he was as much to blame as she was. He could have walked away after the first time, or even the second, he didn’t have to have dinner with her, or coffee, didn’t need to offer her a place to live, all those things had been fuelled by guilt and naked thoughts. Lots of naked thoughts. That was how it had started anyway, now he was aware that when she wasn’t trying to kill him she was actually very likeable.

It was the weirdest thing. He found himself wanting to talk to her. Wanting to ask her questions, wanting to know what she knew about wesen and Grimms. He like that she had advice for him on dealing with certain wesen, he liked that when he drove her to work they could talk openly over coffee about all of the things they’d seen and done.

It was hard, sometimes he put his foot in it and said something that had her anger flaring, but she did the same. Honestly, the fact that he hadn’t killed her yet, the fact that despite the moments of temptation he’d managed to resist, really said a lot about how well they got along.

They tossed the shovels and the scythe into the back of his car and then climbed in front. Both of them took a moment to kick off the excess mud from their boots before sliding in completely but it felt like a bit of a lost cause when their hands were filthy anyway. As he put the key in the ignition, Adalind pulled a pack of wet wipes out of the glove box. He frowned. He had no idea how they’d gotten in there or even when.

She pulled one free of the pack and handed it to him and after raising an eyebrow at her in question he took the wipe and tried his best to scrub away the dirt on his hands. Adalind did the same, using the dim interior light from the ceiling to clean off what she could. They were both going to need to shower when they got home but at least it wasn’t raining this time.

‘We eat breakfast in here far more often than we should,’ she said by way of explaining the wipes. He supposed that did makes sense, he was just surprised not to have noticed her stash them in there.

‘Anything else I should be aware of?’ he wondered.

Adalind fished around under her seat and a moment later produced an ordinary looking first aid kit in a tightly sealed plastic box. When she opened it however, he saw that as well as the usual bandages, gauze, alcohol wipes, scissors and tweezers, there were now three cylinders that looked, at first glance, to be adrenalin injectors. She pulled one out and held it in the light so he could see it better.

‘They’re filled with a really strong sedative,’ she explained. ‘Should be enough in each of these to knock out most wesen.’

For a long moment all he could do was stare at her. He’d had that first aid kit floating around in his car since he’d brought it. At some point, probably on one of the days she’d taken his car, she’d replaced all of the expired items and added a few of her own, ones that would be far more useful for a Grimm than a tube of saline.

‘What?’ she asked, when his look lasted a bit too long.

‘You constantly surprise me.’

She grinned, abashed, before she snapped the kit closed and shoved it back under the seat. ‘You’re not the only one who drives this car and I always like to be prepared.’

‘So where are the weapons?’ he teased, turning the car back toward civilisation and off the little used track toward the road and his trailer.

‘I am the weapon,’ she pointed out. Then she reached down the side of the driver’s seat and the centre console and produced a wicked looking hunting knife in a leather sheath. ‘Doesn’t mean I’m not prepared.’

Bemused, he couldn’t help but smile. He hadn’t known that was there either, not that he’d gone looking for it and frankly, he thought Adalind must have had his car detailed at some point recently because he hadn’t even thought about cleaning it. He’d had no reason to go looking under and between the seats.

The drive to the trailer was short and he was very aware of Adalind leaning forward to look up at it as he got out to unchain the gate. Rather than wait for him to climb back in and then out again, Adalind climbed over the console into the driver’s seat and pulled the car onto the property, parking it in front of the trailer.

‘It really doesn’t look like much,’ she mused. ‘Looking at it, you’d never expect so many people to be looking for it.’

‘That’s why I’d thought it would be fine in the storage yard,’ Nick explained, taking the keys she handed him when she stepped out of the car. He pulled the right key from amongst all of the others and opened the door. He stepped back to allow Adalind to step in first and then followed, pulling the door shut behind him.

‘Light?’

‘Battery powered lantern on your left.’

There was a moment while Adalind held a hand out to search for the light and then the trailer was bathed in a soft blue glow. She held up the lantern and looked around in interest while he turned the other lights on.

‘This is the epitome of not judging a book by its cover.’ He wasn’t sure if she’d meant that as a joke but her voice was filled with awe and she moved around the small trailer with wonder. ‘It’s amazing.’

Nick nodded. ‘If I go get the scythe do you promise not to throw poison in my face when I come back?’

She didn’t respond and he wasn’t even sure she’d heard him. He darted back out as she reached for one of the books resting on the table in the centre. When he came back she held it up for him to see, a glare on her face. It was the book on hexenbiests and she’d found the entry on her he’d added, complete with photo and scathing words.

‘I was mad at you,’ he defended with a grin.

Adalind dropped the book back onto the table and started searching around the table as he added the scythe to the other three he had in the weapons cabinet. He was starting to think he might need a bigger cabinet. When he turned back around, Adalind had a pen in hand and was making her own changes to the book on hexenbiests.

Peering over her should, he was amused to notice that she’d added an addendum to his additions that said, “defied her nature (and possibly her sanity) to ally with both Kelly and Nick Burkhardt – you’re welcome”.

He snorted a laugh but didn’t stop her from adding a few more bits of information to the page. He didn’t blame her for wanting future Grimms to know that she wasn’t all bad. Even if she went back to her evil ways, some future Grimm looking at this might question it and it could save her life.

He should probably make some changes to his will, now that he was thinking about future Grimms using the trailer. He wanted to make sure, if something happened to him before he got to have children of his own, that Trubel or at least Josh got the trailer. Trubel would find more use for it now but if something happened to her at least one of Josh’s descendants would have a use for it. Maybe even Josh himself one day.

‘And you could have at least put a decent photo in there,’ Adalind complained on the drive back to the loft. ‘Where did you even get that one?’

‘I think it came out of your police file during that whole mellifer thing.’

‘That was the first time you saved my life,’ she reminded him.

‘I know,’ he replied. ‘Imagine all the trouble I could have saved myself if I’d just let her kill you too.’ But there was no real sting in his words so Adalind wasn’t offended.

‘Please,’ Adalind scoffed, ‘you’d miss me. Your life would be so boring without me.’

That was probably true but there’d be a lot less lying to Juliette if she weren’t around. Juliette was still awake when he came in, sitting at the table researching something on her laptop. She glanced up when he came through the door, smile on her face but it froze when she got a good look at him.

‘What happened?’

‘What?’ he said in surprise. Sure he was a little dirty but that was nothing that couldn’t be explained away and certainly not anything for Juliette to be worried about.

Juliette got to her feet and moved toward him, reaching out a gentle hand to touch the left side of his face as she did. ‘Did somebody hit you?’

‘What?’ he said again, turning away from her to look in the mirror over the table just inside the door. There was a purple bruise covering the left side of his face. It wasn’t swollen or anything, frankly he hadn’t even noticed. It must have been from the first hit the reaper got in. After that he’d been a little preoccupied trying to stay alive to notice the ache in his jaw and cheek. Adalind clearly hadn’t thought it worth mentioning, obviously it wasn’t that bad.

‘I’ll get you some ice,’ Juliette murmured with a wince.

He shook his head, ‘I’m fine, I didn’t even notice.’

Juliette’s eyes widened in concern, he didn’t know why she was so worried, it wasn’t the first time he’d come home covered in bruises. Even before he’d become a Grimm he’d come home all the time with bumps and scrapes. It was just part of the job. Now that he healed faster than anyone else he barely even noticed something as trivial as a bruised face.

‘Nick, how could you not notice?’ Juliette wondered. ‘That must have been a pretty hard blow.’

He shrugged, walking around her to head for the stairs. ‘I got jumped by a reaper.’

‘A reaper?’ Trubel asked, jogging down the stairs toward him. ‘What’s a reaper?’

‘They hunt down Grimms,’ Nick replied. ‘They even use scythes like in the stories.’

‘Cool.’

Nick was glad Trubel found the whole thing cool because Juliette, who followed him up the stairs, definitely didn’t. ‘You were attacked by a reaper?’

He nodded. ‘I’m not sure if he was on his own or if the Royals sent him.’

‘The Royals?’ Juliette sounded alarmed, he wasn’t sure why.

‘They’re probably after the keys again,’ he explained, kicking off his boots and taking off his jacket as he made his way into the bathroom. He was making light of the situation because he really didn’t want to worry her but also because he wasn’t all that worried about the attack. He and Adalind had dealt with the threat and until something else came along or they figured out why the reaper had attacked him now, there wasn’t much they could do about it.

So why worry about it?

When he emerged from the shower, Juliette was pulling on pyjamas and getting ready for bed. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she asked, reaching to tilt his jaw when he came close enough so she could get a nice look at it in the light now that he was clean.

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘It really is nothing.’

‘Are you coming to bed?’

He shook his head, ‘Not yet, I want to talk to Trubel about the reapers, just in case.’

It wasn’t a lie; he did need to talk to Trubel about the reapers but he also didn’t know that he was ready to crawl into bed with Juliette while she was so worried. Which, he was aware, seemed like a strange contradiction, shouldn’t he want to crawl in beside her to offer comfort and reassurance? But he couldn’t, he really was fine and he felt that climbing in beside Juliette wouldn’t sell that fact nearly as well as just carrying on with his night.

Besides, Trubel was always happy to learn more about wesen and she seemed genuinely intrigued by the idea of reapers. He supposed, given that most of her interactions with wesen had involved them freaking out when they realised she was a Grimm, the idea of a species of wesen actively hunting Grimms was fascinating.

He hoped she never had to learn first-hand how lethal some species of wesen were and how happy they were to target Grimms. The reapers weren’t the only ones and as much as he’d like to protect her from all of the bad, she was a Grimm and she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. As if she hadn’t already proven that enough, beheading Weston Steward and saving Renard’s life probably said it all.

‘Did you kill the reaper?’ she asked when he finished telling her what had happened on each of his encounters with them.

He nodded. ‘I wasn’t about to let him kill me.’

‘Good.’

‘Are you okay?’ Nick asked. ‘I know you’ve killed wesen before but Steward was different, he was technically a federal agent.’

Trubel shrugged. ‘I’m okay. You get used to the killing, I was just worried they would try and lock me up.’

He wished he could say that wasn’t true, that every life he took was as hard as the first but it wasn’t. Trubel was right when she said it got easier. Maybe it was because the stakes were higher as a Grimm fighting wesen than they were as a detective fighting ordinary criminals but he couldn’t help but agree with her.

The longer he was a Grimm, the easier it got to bury the bodies and not look back, often that was a literal statement and not just a metaphorical one – tonight being case in point.

‘Just do me a favour,’ Nick requested of her, before he went up to bed.

‘Anything,’ Trubel acquiesced easily.

‘Please don’t tell Juliette how easy it is, I’m not sure she really understands.’

Trubel nodded. ‘Is it hard?’ she asked.

‘Is what hard?’

‘Lying to Juliette all the time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It took you a while, right, to tell her the truth about wesen, but you still don’t tell her everything, do you?’

Nick considered his words carefully, not wanting to give Trubel the wrong impression but also not wanting to risk putting a strain on her relationship with Juliette. ‘No, I don’t tell her everything. There are some things you don’t understand when you’re not a Grimm or wesen.’

‘Hey, I get it,’ Trubel assured him. ‘I don’t want her knowing how many people I’ve killed either.’

Nick smiled ruefully. ‘Good night, Trubel.’

‘Night, Nick.’


	6. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Delving a little into the deeper mythology here - well my interpretation anyway - with a new case.

All three of them stood over the body as though if they kept looking at it somehow it might make sense. Nick didn’t imagine that would happen anytime soon because what were you supposed to do when the “body” you’d been called to investigate was in actual fact a store mannequin painted up and dressed to look like a woman – possibly in her late thirties – with the hands angled into a cup over its chest as though cradling something precious.

‘And it was a human heart?’ Hank asked Wu again, just to be sure.

Wu nodded. ‘Yep.’

Nick’s gaze moved beyond the “body” to the concrete of the warehouse floor. Someone, potentially the killer – if there indeed was a killer – had painted a large white circle on the floor around the “body” and then filled it with letters and symbols Nick didn’t recognise. The symbols, also painted in white, ran around the inside of the circle making it hard to tell where they began and ended. CSU had already taken photos and Wu had taken a few of his own but it could take them a while to make sense of it all.

Then there was the fact that reaching out from the circle to each of the cardinal points (Wu had checked) was a line of writing stretching out three feet in deep red. This was in German but as he still utterly failed to speak the language (and he should really probably learn) the most he’d been able to do was identify it. Which the first responders had already done.

‘Has anyone translated the German yet?’ Nick asked.

Wu nodded. ‘Ran it through a translation app on my phone. As far as I can tell they’re prayers.’

‘Prayers?’ Nick repeated. ‘To who or what?’

Wu pointed to the line of text stretching north, ‘This one is to God.’ He pointed east. ‘To ancestors.’ South was apparently for descendants while west used a word his app hadn’t been able to translate. Fortunately for Nick, the word was something he recognised because it wasn’t actually German, it was Latin: decapitare. That last line stretching west was a prayer to Grimms.

Because the whole thing hadn’t been weird enough already without the prayer to him and others like him. Honestly the idea of someone praying to a Grimm creeped him out.

‘You’d be surprised how many people used to worship your ancestors,’ Adalind told him over the phone when he called her hoping she’d be able to make sense of the circle and the symbols. Both Monroe and Rosalee had been at a loss though they’d both happily started looking into it.

‘They worshipped Grimms?’ he sounded incredulous and it seemed to amuse Adalind.

‘Sure,’ she said easily. ‘They didn’t live very long when the local wesen found out who’d called in the Grimm to come and chop off their heads but clearly the belief endured.’

Nick leaned back in his chair and spun lightly side to side as he thought about the implications of that disturbing glimpse into the past. Hank was away from his desk talking to an old girlfriend who was Wiccan and he hoped might be able to shed some light on the symbols so Nick wasn’t too worried about being overheard.

‘Are you still looking at the photos?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘That third one, the one that shows the whole thing from above.’ Dutifully he brought the photo up on his computer screen and waited for Adalind to give him more. ‘I have no idea what most of this stuff says but I think that’s the point.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the prayers on the outside, they’re just your basic call to anyone who’s listening. Lots of cultures include ancestor worship in their religions, though not usually descendants, that’s a new one for me.’

‘Are you, at any point, going to tell me something useful?’ Nick wanted to know.

‘What do I get out of it?’ Adalind asked in return. ‘What do you normally give Monroe and Rosalee for all their help?’

‘A thank you?’ Nick offered. ‘The satisfaction of knowing they potentially helped save a life?’

Adalind scoffed and he could just imagine her rolling her eyes and wrinkling her nose at the absurdity of offering her help and advice for free. He thought it was absurd that she thought he’d believe for one second that she wouldn’t just tell him. She loved this stuff, he’d called her for a reason, after all. She’d tell him just to prove that she knew more than everyone else.

Which was a total lie but if he let her believe he believed that then neither of them had to acknowledge the truth which was that Adalind liked helping him. It just ruined her reputation and went against everything they’d done to each other over the years.

‘It’s definitely wesen,’ she told him. ‘Some of the symbols I recognise from three different rites but they all essentially mean the same thing. Nick, this circle, I think it’s an offering and a cry for help.’

‘An offering?’ That didn’t exactly sound like a good thing. Hadn’t offerings in the past generally involved sacrifices or food. Or both.

‘I think whoever wrote this put the “body” there with the heart to get your attention.’

‘It’s an offering to me?’ This time he knew he sounded a bit horrified but he didn’t want someone offering him body parts. What would he even do with them?

He pictured Adalind shrugging her shoulders in the soft brown leather jacket she’d been wearing that morning, the one she’d paired with a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans that must have been new but did some really nice things to her ass. Which he wasn’t thinking about. At all.

‘Maybe? I don’t know. Do you know where the heart came from?’

They didn’t. They’d checked with hospitals and transplant centres but no one appeared to be missing a heart. Worryingly, the ME had concluded that the heart had been removed from a chest no less than five hours before it had been found in the hands of the mannequin and that the body it came from had been recently dead and didn’t show any signs of cold storage. Whether or not that meant they were looking for a killer or someone who had taken advantage of a nearby death they didn’t yet know. They were still checking with all other medical facilities and funeral homes.

‘Well maybe when you find the owner of the heart I’ll be able to tell you more.’

‘I hate hoping for another body to turn up.’ It always felt like he was failing the victims, though he supposed in this case if the body did turn up, sans heart, then at least in this case they wouldn’t really be dealing with another body. There wouldn’t be another victim just the same one in two separate places.

Which turned out to be optimistic and completely wrong.

‘Man, that is just all kinds of wrong,’ Hank muttered.

The “body” they were standing over this time was a male mannequin and he was unfortunately anatomically correct. Which, apart from being painful to think about, was worrying because the heart had definitely belonged to a woman and unless they were talking transgender, then the body parts that had just turned up were definitely male.

Two “bodies” in two days, one female with a heart, one male with newly attached genitals, also being cupped which was just a really weird image to have stuck in his head. ‘I really hope he was already dead when that happened,’ Nick muttered and all three of them visibly shuddered.

Without knowing who the heart or the genitals belonged to, their investigation was stalled. Checking the DNA for both organs would take time and relied on the DNA being in the system to give them a useable result. For Nick and Hank that meant focusing on the wesen aspect of the case while Wu tried the ordinary things like checking for any surveillance cameras in the surrounding area, running the owners of the buildings, the people who had found the bodies and anyone else even remotely connected in the hopes that something useful would come of it.

On the way to the trailer to see if they couldn’t find something they might have missed the night before, Nick called Monroe and Rosalee to update them.

‘His genitals?’ Monroe practically yelped.

‘Yep,’ Nick confirmed.

‘Ouch.’

‘Yeah,’ Hank agreed, turning to look at Nick as he held the phone aloft from the passenger seat. ‘The mannequin was posed in a circle just like the other one, same writing and everything.’

‘We haven’t been able to find out anything about the writing,’ Rosalee apologised. ‘There are just too many languages.’

‘And all saying the same thing,’ Nick told them. ‘It’s just repeating the words “help” and “hope” over and over again.’

‘Weird way to ask for help,’ Monroe pointed out.

‘But who are they asking for help and why?’ Rosalee wanted to know.

Nick was really hoping the answer to that question wasn’t him because as much as he hadn’t liked the idea of someone giving him a heart as an offering the idea that someone had gifted him a penis just wasn’t something he knew how to handle.

The trailer didn’t offer them any answers, not that they’d really been expecting it to. Adalind, however, did have something for him when he picked her up from work – a little later than intended because being in the trailer didn’t give you a great sense of time passing.

‘I think I’ve narrowed down your wesen,’ she announced once he’d caught her up on the new “body” and the same circle and writing.

‘You have?’ Nick was surprised though he wasn’t sure why.

‘Well, more accurately I think I’ve narrowed it down to the fact that it’s not wesen at all.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve been assuming that because it mentions you and its asking for hope and help that its wesen in design but I don’t think it is.’ She held out a hand to him. ‘Phone.’

He took his hand off the steering wheel to reach into the pocket of his jacket in order to fish out his phone. He was a little worried when she easily unlocked it without having to ask for the pin code but he didn’t dwell on it. He glanced over at her to see her easily navigating through the photos on his phone so she could see the ones he’d taken of the symbols and circle today.

‘It’s this bit here that was bothering me.’ She had to wait for him to stop at a light before she could show him the symbol she was talking about. ‘It took me ages to figure out what it is because its written backward and that made it easier because once you take into account the mistakes that were made when the symbols were written down you realise that all this is just for show.’

‘So, what? Someone found this in a book and copied it down?’

Adalind spent a few more minutes fiddling with his phone as she explained she didn’t think that was the case either. ‘There are just too many different cultures represented. I think this was meant for you but I don’t think its wesen made and I don’t think it’s meant as a threat.’

‘So we’re back to that whole offering idea?’

Adalind nodded, handing him back his phone. ‘Though why anyone would think you’d appreciate a human heart and a penis, I don’t know.’

When he was telling Juliette and Trubel about the case over dinner later, he carefully avoided telling them that it appeared to be an offering for him. He didn’t think Trubel would have held it against him but he worried that Juliette would just take it as another sign that they couldn’t have a safe and normal future.

Besides, he didn’t have any proof of what Adalind was saying and he’d prefer not to bring it up unless he had incontrovertible proof that the person responsible for these “bodies” was really trying to get his attention. Really, they knew nothing and were just relying on Wu finding something useful through one of his searches or the teams he had out canvassing.

Another “body” really wasn’t what he was looking for. This one was meant to look like a child and its plastic hands were clasped over the fake ears framing the opening that had been cut into the head where a human brain sat comfortably nestled on a bed of silk.

The writing was the same, the circle the same, the whole set up was the same. No answers, no ideas, no leads and the media had caught wind of it, mostly because of the odd nature of the crimes. There was nothing to say they were actually homicides which was at least keeping the media from blowing things out of proportion but that didn’t mean they weren’t capitalising on the complete lack of leads they had on the case.

‘Are you going to eat that?’ Adalind wanted to know. He’d been lost in thought, not really paying much attention to his food but when he looked down he realised that while he’d barely touched his burger, Adalind had already devoured her wrap, salad and fries and was eyeing off his own side of fries.

He pushed the bowl toward her. ‘Did you miss lunch or something?’

Adalind shook her head. ‘I’m just starving.’ She motioned at his plate again. ‘You’re thinking too much, you should eat.’

They were having dinner at a roadside diner before they went to check the trailer in the hopes that Adalind might be able to find something he and Hank had missed. He wasn’t expecting much but at least Adalind was a fresh pair of eyes, and a multilingual set at that. It was entirely possible they’d been staring at the answers the whole time and hadn’t known because they were written the wrong way. Or the right way, as Adalind was hoping for.

In an attempt to think about something else, Nick picked up his burger and asked Adalind about her day. ‘Did you sort out that problem you were having with the grads?’

Adalind shook her head, picking up another fry. ‘I found the document they’ve been using and I know it’s referencing the wrong sub clause but I can’t find the right one and even if I do find the right one do I report it or just correct all of the students?’

If she was hoping Nick would have an answer for her she was going to be disappointed. Solving crimes and preventing people from breaking the law was about as far as he got, never mind the intricacies of contract law. He honestly had no idea how Adalind kept it all straight.

‘What does your boss think?’

‘Oh she knows I’m right but she was criminal law and so she’s not as familiar with the fine print.’

‘At least she knows you’re right,’ Nick offered.

Adalind grinned at him. ‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?’

‘I really don’t.’

‘You get points for listening,’ she assured him, ‘and for remembering I was having the issue in the first place.’

It was Nick’s turn to shrug. ‘If you have to listen to me complain about work then I guess I can listen to you.’

‘You guess?’ Adalind repeated, amused.

Nick gave her a thoughtful look and she smiled under his scrutiny. ‘This isn’t weird anymore,’ he observed. ‘I mean it was weird in the beginning because it wasn’t weird but now it’s just normal.’

‘You mean this?’ Adalind asked, waving a hand between them to indicate not only their sharing dinner but the easy way they talked and teased.

‘Yeah,’ Nick confirmed, though even to his own ears he sounded confused. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, not really, he couldn’t just point to one particular moment and say that was when it had happened, but he and Adalind had reached a point in their – and he really didn’t want to use this word – relationship (friendship?) that they could sit down in a diner and have dinner and it felt perfectly normal. For all his protests and emphatic dismissal of the idea, he trusted Adalind and though he really didn’t like admitting it, he did like her.

‘I think,’ she began slowly, ‘this is what it should have been like from the beginning.’

‘What? Us being friends?’ he asked and then immediately regretted it because she shot him a triumphant look at his use of the word “friends”.

‘I had a very strange conversation when I was in Austria,’ she told him. ‘Actually, I’ve had a few strange conversations. This was with the woman who helped me get my powers back but all these powerful people keep telling me weird things that I’m now starting to think really have something to do with you, well not you really, but us.’

‘What?’ That hadn’t made much sense to Nick but judging by the confused frown on Adalind’s face it hadn’t made much sense to her either, now or then.

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged it off as the usual weirdness that was their life and just moved on to another topic. ‘I finally got my office sorted so I can fit in it.’

‘I’m surprised it took you this long.’

‘The idiot who had the job before me was a slob,’ she reminded him. ‘There were things in that office dating back ten years.’

‘I thought he only had the job for six months?’

‘Yes,’ Adalind nodded like he could now see the extent of the problem. ‘I’m not even sure how he did that.’

Nick laughed and took a last bite of his burger. Adalind had successfully finished off his fries but he wasn’t too annoyed. He ordered another coffee to go and then they left the diner and made their way back to his car and on to the trailer. This time he made Adalind get out and open the gate and when he pulled the car in and cut the engine she walked up beside him. Her movements were slow and there was an odd look on her face. She kept looking around.

When he stepped out of the car the hair on the back of his neck stood up and a shiver raced down his spine. Beside him, Adalind woged. ‘Are we being watched?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered, spinning in slow circles with a face that looked like a corpse. It didn’t bother him anymore, whether he’d gotten used to it or he just saw it as another part of her, he didn’t know. Besides, she was wearing those ass hugging jeans again, the ones that clung like a second skin and so even if he’d been able to focus on her and not the creepy feeling rushing down his spine he doubted his eyes would have been on her face.

And yeah, he was aware he had problems, they just weren’t ones he needed to deal with straight away. Potential threat lurking in the woods trumped the alarming attraction he felt toward Adalind.

He closed his eyes and listened, trying to sort through the sounds for something that didn’t belong. He could hear rustling, movement coming from what he thought was behind the trailer but it didn’t seem big and could have been an animal. His eyes certainly didn’t give anything away.

Adalind had her eyes open but was listening just as intently, head tilted slightly as she tried to figure out what was giving both of them the feeling of being watched. ‘I think,’ she started to say but the snapping of a twig cut her off and they both whirled around.

A figure emerged from the trees. Dressed in black, balaclava pulled down over his face he charged across the clearing toward them. The figure was tall and stocky and for a moment Nick and Adalind stared in surprise before Adalind snarled, narrowed her eyes and he slammed into an invisible wall just moments before he could reach them. The impact knocked him off his feet and so all Nick had to do was press one boot heavily into the figure’s chest. Adalind shook of her hexenbiest face and moved to stand beside Nick – helpfully pressing one of her own booted feet down on the figure’s wrist and preventing him from taking a swing at Nick with the knife in his hand.

They both looked down at the figure in confusion. Nick reached down and removed the balaclava but being able to see their would-be attacker’s face didn’t shed any light on the situation. He wasn’t anyone Nick recognised and when he glanced at Adalind she shook her head as well.

Nick reached for his phone and turned the flashlight on so he could get a better look at the figure. In the glow of his phone Nick realised the man was more like a kid, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen though he suspected he was younger. There was a cut on one of his cheeks that seemed to be a few days old and his nose looked like it had been broken a couple of times.

‘They’re coming!’ the kid yelped, he sounded frightened and he struggled to get free but Nick put more pressure on his chest and he wheezed.

‘Check him for ID,’ Nick requested and he saw out of the corner of his eye the way Adalind managed to crouch over the boy to check his pockets without taking the pressure off his wrist. She stood a moment later with a wallet and after opening it, handed him a driver’s license.

Chuck Fuentes was a kid, just seventeen and he was a long way from home. According to his licence he was from Miami, which Nick supposed explained the healthy tan despite the fact that it was well on its way to being winter and sunny days were becoming a fond memory.

‘Please!’ he begged. ‘You have to help me, they’re coming!’

‘Who’s coming?’ Nick asked calmly, he’d prefer not to suddenly have a bunch of people stumbling across the trailer but he wasn’t particularly worried just yet. Something about this whole thing felt off.

‘Monsters!’ Fuentes babbled. ‘Real Monsters!’

‘Did you just get the sudden urge to growl “aaaarrggggghhhh”?’ Adalind asked Nick in a whisper that carried, just as it was supposed to.

He snorted at her joke but then turned his attention back to the kid still securely pressed into the ground. ‘There’s no such thing as monsters.’

‘I’m telling you they were real and they’re going to kill me!’

Nick and Adalind continued to stare down at him.

After a moment the kid stopped struggling and sighed. ‘You’re not buying this are you?’

‘No,’ they told him.

He gave an aggrieved sigh and then surged upward with unexpected strength, toppling both Nick and Adalind backward. Nick managed to stay on his feet and it was only his grip on Adalind’s arm that stopped her from landing on her butt. They’d barely steadied themselves before the kid woged and they found themselves staring up at a jagerbar, one built even bigger and stronger than he’d looked lying on the ground in the dark.

‘Oh shit.’

Adalind’s words barely registered because Fuentes launched into a perfect tackle, shoulder ramming into Nick’s middle and knocking him flat while Adalind was shoved aside. Fuentes, recovered quickly and while he drew back to punch Nick he also kicked out at Adalind who’d been attempting to come up behind him. He missed Adalind because she was fast but his fist struck Nick in the stomach knocking the little breath he’d managed to take right out of him.

Satisfied with the blow he’d delivered, Fuentes struck out with his claws, gouging four deep cuts through Nick’s jacket, sweater and the t-shirt he was wearing underneath. The pain was hot and sharp and Nick really hoped those claws hadn’t done too much damage. Fuentes growled and it looked like he was about to stab those claws instead of raking them across Nick’s chest when a thick branch slammed into the back of Fuentes’ head.

In his desire to cut Nick up he’d forgotten about Adalind. The branch splintered around his head, showering Nick with small pieces of wood and probably giving Adalind some serious splinters but it didn’t knock Fuentes out. It just made him angrier. Fuentes spun around, surging off Nick to attack Adalind but she was fast, while his claws grazed her side she jammed what Nick belatedly realised was one of the injector pens from the first aid kit right into the side of his neck.

Fuentes snarled and smacked Adalind across the face with the back of his hand but the blow was muted as the drug took effect. Adalind fell but even as she did Fuentes slumped, all of the strength apparently draining from his limbs. He swayed and then landed face first on the ground beside Adalind.

Nick tried to sit up but his chest burned and when he reached tentatively to feel the damage his hand came away sticky with blood. Carefully, Nick rolled onto his side and then clambered onto his hands and knees before struggling to his feet. Adalind was lying on the ground, her face bright red where Fuentes had made contact with her temple. He didn’t dare look down at his own wounds, not until he’d secured Fuentes – if that was even the kid’s name.

Helpfully, the jagerbar had landed on his face and so that made securing the cuffs behind his back nice and easy. He made sure to turn the kid’s head so he could breathe in something that wasn’t dirt and then moved to check on Adalind.

‘Adalind?’ He knelt beside her and gently moved her hair away from her temple so he could see where she’d been hit. He tried to be as gentle as possibly but even the light graze of his fingers made her wince.

‘I’m waiting for the world to stop spinning,’ she informed him. ‘Are you bleeding?’

Satisfied that Adalind was okay, Nick finally glanced down, carefully peeling his sweater and t-shirt away to get a look at his chest. They didn’t look deep and they thankfully weren’t bleeding badly. 

‘I’m okay. I think the bleeding is already stopping.’

‘Oh good.’

While Adalind waited for the world to stop spinning, Nick carefully turned to do a more thorough search of the kid’s pockets. He turned up a roll of cash that looked to be comprised of twenties and probably totalled around $300, a lighter, pack of smokes and what looked like a business card though it was blank except for four crooked lines in the centre. He didn’t have a phone on him and Nick hoped that meant he hadn’t called anyone and told him where he was going.

Adalind eased herself to her feet and started to wander in the direction Fuentes had come from. After a moment of searching in the trees she came up with a backpack. A little searching with a pair of gloves he’d recovered from the trailer (he really didn’t need to be compromising evidence seeing as they hadn’t had to kill this one) turned up a couple of spray cans of red and white paint, and a notebook filled with the same weird symbols that had been painted in the circles with the bodies.

Nick gave the contents a bemused look. ‘That was too easy.’

‘You still don’t know where the parts came from,’ Adalind reminded him. ‘Or why this guy – if it really was him – was painting those things in the first place.’

Nick carefully bundled up the evidence into the back of the car and then he and Adalind awkwardly carried Fuentes to the car and shoved him into the back so that his head was pushed against one door and his feet the other.

‘This is going to be really hard to explain,’ Nick realised as he started the drive back into Portland. ‘I’ll have to take you home first.’

‘I can give a statement if you need me to.’

‘I’d really prefer if it didn’t come to that. I don’t think I want Renard knowing you’re still in town. He’s only just stopped looking at me funny.’

He supposed the beauty of working with Hank and Renard was that when he called Hank and told him to meet him down in the garage he didn’t ask too many questions. Wu wanted to ask, but he refrained when he realised that Nick was bleeding – though the claw marks might have raised a few more questions, Wu obviously decided then and there was not the place for them.

‘He just attacked you?’ Renard asked for clarification twenty minutes later when they were tucked securely in his office while Wu dealt with Fuentes.

Nick nodded. ‘Came flying out of the trees and attacked me,’ he confirmed. ‘I had a sedative in the car that I was planning to test out and I guess it works because it knocked him out cold and I brought him here.’

‘And he had evidence on him linking him to our mannequin bodies?’

‘Yep.’

Renard shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I like how easy that was.’

Nick definitely agreed with that but when the lab tested all of the gear on the backpack they found only Fuentes’ fingerprints and some DNA. There was also trace amounts of DNA in the bag from the heart, brain and genitals that had been recovered from each of the crime scenes.

‘Why’d you do it?’ Nick asked, when they’d been through all of the damning evidence and still hadn’t gotten answers out of the kid.

Fuentes kept his mouth shut and it didn’t matter how many questions they asked, how hard they worked him he refused to talk. In the end, it took tracking an email address they found in the notebook to find out where he’d been staying while he was in Portland. When Wu took a couple of uniforms to check out the address they found three bodies: a woman, man and child hidden under the floor.

‘But you don’t know who they are?’ Juliette sounded sad. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Weird that he just attacked you,’ Trubel added. ‘What do you think he wanted?’

Nick had no idea but he couldn’t dwell on it, he’d caught the killer even if he didn’t know the victims or why they’d been killed and that would have to be enough.

‘Well,’ Adalind said, accepting the coffee he offered her the next morning. She had a huge bruise covering the side of her face that looked incredibly painful but she seemed to be acting as though it wasn’t there, ‘At least we didn’t kill this one.’

Nick snorted a laugh, using his fingers to tilt her face by the chin so he could better see how badly she was bruised. Adalind didn’t heal as fast as he did but she did heal faster than most people. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to be sporting that bruise for a few days.

‘Something just doesn’t feel right,’ Nick said one he’d satisfied himself checking on Adalind’s temple and put the car in gear.

Adalind nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Trubel meets Adalind she has some interesting (and insightful) questions for Nick.

He didn’t remember falling asleep but, as he realised later, that was because he hadn’t so much fallen asleep as passed out. He clearly remembered walking out of the Law Building and that he’d been holding the side door open for Adalind when she’d shouted a warning and he’d ducked just in time to avoid a blow to the back of his head.

Things were a bit blurry after that but he distinctly remembered the symbol on his attacker’s hand and that there had been three of them. He thought he and Adalind might have killed two of them but at some point he’d taken a blow to the back of the head (he thought it might be more a case of his whole body colliding with the side of the building) and after that he’d been a bit unsteady on his feet and not to clear on the details.

He did know Adalind had dragged him away and stuffed him into the passenger seat of the car – he thought she might have been suffering from her own wounds at the time – and then he definitely remembered her reckless driving as she sped away from Campus but things after that were a little fuzzy.

It really didn’t help that he woke to the sound of yelling and fighting.

Reality crashed back around him and he sat up, ignoring the way the world spun a little, as he struggled to make sense of what was happening. He was on the bed (that was really more of a couch) in the trailer and someone, most likely Adalind, had removed his jacket and t-shirt. Given how much it hurt to move he assumed that had been a necessity but there was just a little too much going on in the confines of the trailer to worry about that at the moment.

He shoved up off the bed just in time to get between Trubel and a woged Adalind. The knife Trubel was brandishing was suddenly pointing at his chest and he could feel the heat radiating out of Adalind as she put her hands on his back to steady him. Despite the reassuring pressure, he swayed a little.

‘Trubel!’ he shouted, hands going up to stop her. ‘Stop. It’s okay.’

‘You’re okay?’ Trubel asked warily, still not lowering the knife.

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her, the lie coming easy when he knew neither of them were actually talking about his wounds. ‘You can put the knife down.’

There was a moment where it looked like she was going to lunge passed him for Adalind before she dropped it back down onto the shelf she’d likely snatched it from. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

Nick nodded and immediately regretted it. ‘Adalind?’

‘Nick?’

‘I think I’m going to pass out again.’

He thought he heard both Adalind and Trubel calling his name but much like he’d said, he must have passed out again because when he came to what felt like hours later (really, it was only thirty-four minutes) he was back on the bed and while Adalind was sat beside him with her back pressed against the wall, Trubel was sitting in the chair watching her with wary eyes.

Adalind was the first to notice he was awake. He suspected it was because while Trubel was busy glaring at her she’d been watching him for any sign that he was getting either better or worse. She helped him sit up and propped some cushions under his back before handing him a plastic water bottle filled with a truly disgusting looking chunky grey liquid.

‘You were poisoned,’ she explained. ‘You need to drink as much of that as you can keep down.’

He was aware of Trubel scrutinising their every word and move but at the moment his back and stomach hurt and his head was still spinning and so he could only focus on one thing at a time. Trusting that Adalind knew what she was talking about. He upended the bottle and hastily drank down as much of the foul tasting drink as he could. He managed to swallow half the bottle before he gagged and had to resist the urge to throw it all back up.

Adalind took the bottle back off him, put the cap firmly back on and then reached across him for a marker that was on the shelf. Carefully she labelled the bottle and then she climbed over him to add it to his own bottles of poisons and antidotes. ‘You had everything I needed here,’ she explained. ‘It’s why I brought you here and not the hospital.’

The antidote seemed to be fast acting, at least his head had finally stopped spinning enough that he could spread some of his attention to Trubel who had remained still and silent throughout his and Adalind’s exchange.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Trubel, not that it was really a surprise, it was just kind of late for her to have ridden her bike all this way.

‘I was looking for you,’ she replied. ‘You weren’t answering your phone.’

‘I think it’s in the car,’ Adalind told him, answering his unasked question. Given he was still shirtless and he didn’t think it was in his pants’ pockets, it had been a legitimate question. He saw his heavy grey jacket hanging off the back of Trubel’s chair but he suspected his t-shirt wasn’t salvageable.

‘What happened?’ Trubel asked, it seemed like she was building up to asking about Adalind, that or they’d had one truly awkward conversation while he’d been out.

‘We were attacked by Verrat,’ he answered. ‘I don’t really remember the details.’

‘That’s the poison,’ Adalind explained helpfully. ‘I think they were intending to take us.’

‘Huh,’ Nick murmured. ‘I thought that must have been the wall I got thrown into.’

‘No,’ Adalind assured him, ‘that’s just all the bruises on your back.’

Nick looked down, gingerly poking and prodding his various visible injuries until he got to the big white bandage covering his right side, just below his ribs. ‘I got stabbed?’

‘It’s more of a graze,’ Adalind corrected. ‘The blade was poisoned and it took a nice chunk out of your side. It’ll heal,’ she said, almost dismissively. Her uncaring tone was ruined by the obvious worry that she’d been feeling for the hours he’d been out. Because it must have been hours the first time, long enough for Trubel to get worried and come looking for him.

‘Were they after me or you?’ he asked.

Adalind suddenly looked more worried. ‘I think they were after both of us,’ she said. ‘Nick, I think they knew we’d be together.’

The idea that Viktor knew they could be found together was worrying but not alarmingly so. Really, it had only been a matter of time before the Royals noticed anyone they sent after Adalind or the Portland Grimm was getting killed, not just by one or the other, but by both. He assumed someone had to be sending reports back home as they hadn’t exactly been about to leave their attackers unharmed.

Viktor would have wanted a report. He would know the risks of sending wesen after a Grimm, he’d have someone holding back and watching on to send that report back to him. It wasn’t worrying that he’d sent the Verrat after the both of them, just that Renard had people on the inside feeding him information on the Royals and what they were up to, this wasn’t something they wanted getting back to Renard.

‘What’s going on?’ Trubel demanded. ‘Why is she here? I thought you hated her? She is the one who tried to kill Hank and poisoned Juliette, right?’

Both Nick and Adalind shrugged that off like it didn’t really mean anything. It was a lot easier to do now that they’d saved each other’s lives just as often as they’d tried to take them.

And that was a really unsettling realisation. Not only because they really couldn’t view each other as enemies anymore, or that the good they’d done together now (mostly) outweighed the bad but because they’d needed to save each other and themselves. By skipping out on the deal she’d made with the Royals, Adalind seemed to have placed a lot of attention on both of them. Which would almost be understandable if it weren’t for the fact that it wasn’t only the Royals coming after them looking for Diana.

A number of the attacks on Adalind (before she’d moved into the loft) had nothing to do with the Royals, that Fuentes kid didn’t either and as far as they could tell he’d been targeting Nick specifically. Either they’d both pissed somebody off or there was something going on they weren’t aware of. Really it could go either way. It just seemed like there was too much going on for it to just be about Diana, she was important but killing Nick and Adalind wouldn’t get Viktor any closer, it would actually make it harder for him to get to her.

‘It’s a really long story,’ Nick told Trubel. ‘No one can know she’s still in Portland, it’s not safe.’

‘Why do you care if she’s safe?’ Trubel demanded, which was a pretty fair question.

‘I owe her,’ was the explanation Nick gave. ‘We stole her child,’ he pointed out. ‘I owe her a little protection.’

If Trubel saw the many flaws in this explanation she kindly didn’t point them out. ‘No one knows she’s in town?’ she clarified. ‘Not even Monroe?’

It was probably telling that she didn’t ask about Juliette or Hank but rather Monroe. Whether it said more about Trubel’s observational skills or his own behaviour he couldn’t say. He hoped it was the former because if it were the latter then he’d probably be in more trouble than just having to explain his secrets to the younger Grimm.

‘No,’ Nick confirmed. ‘And it needs to stay that way, especially if the Verrat are looking for her. She broke a deal with them and they’re not happy about it.’

‘What kind of deal?’ Trubel asked.

‘I was supposed to give them Nick,’ Adalind explained, which was more or less the truth.

‘Oh.’ Trubel nodded. ‘I won’t tell.’

It was funny, how Trubel could go from trying to take off Adalind’s head when she thought she was a threat to Nick to accepting that no one could know Adalind was in town and that she was on the list of wesen that weren’t to be killed. He supposed Trubel, much like his mother, had never been hurt by Adalind and so it was a lot easier to just take her at face value. If Nick said she was all right, then that was enough for Trubel.

It was refreshing to have someone trust his judgement so completely for once, even in such dubious circumstances.

It also probably helped that Nick wasn’t acting like discovering Adalind in the trailer with him was a big deal or something he should feel guilty about. He was just acting like he was doing what was necessary and so there was no guilt for Trubel to pick up on, no underlying tension (at least not the kind associated with lying to his girlfriend) for her to read too much into. His friendship (and he still winced at that word) with Adalind just was, there wasn’t any need to explain it to Trubel, no need to justify it because she believed him when he said it needed to be a secret for Adalind’s safety (which was true for the most part, so that helped).

He supposed it helped that he didn’t actually feel guilty. He didn’t owe Trubel any explanations and so he wasn’t giving off the sense that he was doing something wrong. He didn’t feel like he had to justify anything.

Not like he would have if it had been Juliette who found him in the trailer.

He was aware that wasn’t fair to Juliette, that she would have every right to be angry if she found Adalind was in town and Nick had known all about it. Juliette wasn’t a bad person; she didn’t like Adalind but she felt bad about taking Diana. The knowledge that Juliette probably would have been able to accept Adalind’s still being in Portland if he’d been up front from the beginning (though perhaps not about the sex) only increased the guilt he was starting to feel every time he was around Juliette.

He wasn’t going to think about that, though, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Juliette probably wouldn’t like some of the choices he’d made but they were his choices to make. Adalind belonged firmly in the Grimm part of his life, any decisions he made about dealing with her (or giving her a place to live and making friends with her) were entirely up to him.

And there were those justifications again but Juliette had been making it more and more clear lately that she didn’t like all that came with his being a Grimm and so really she had no right to complain when he made choices directly related to being a Grimm without informing her.

‘Is there still that spare change of clothes in here?’ Nick asked, he couldn’t exactly go home looking like he was, he really didn’t need Juliette seeing how hurt he was.

Adalind shook her head. ‘I put one in the car, though,’ she informed him. ‘I’ll go get you a shirt and your phone.’

Adalind slipped out of the trailer leaving him alone Trubel wondering when the hell Adalind had put a spare set of clothes in his car. Was it even his car anymore? It was starting to feel like theirs even if she didn’t drive it all that often. He’d never have thought to put the first aid kit in there and he’d certainly never have thought about how handy it would be to have a spare set of clothes lying around.

‘Are you really okay?’ Trubel asked once the door had shut behind Adalind.

If it had been Adalind to ask the question he’d have been completely honest and told her that his side felt like it was on fire and was starting to itch a little and that his back was one ginormous ache but he didn’t want Trubel worrying about him and, if he were being honest, she’d been through worse herself and so he didn’t need her worrying over him. He would be fine; he figured his back would be tender for a day and his side would likely take a couple more to heal but he was fine. Even as he sat there waiting for Adalind to come back his head was clearing more and more.

‘Adalind knows what she’s doing,’ he told Trubel. ‘The antidote is already working.’

Adalind came back with a sealed plastic bag full of clothes and his phone. She handed him both and though he was tempted to check his phone for messages he really wanted to put a shirt on so Trubel didn’t have to keep looking at all of his injuries. Or just his naked chest. It was hard to say which was making her more uncomfortable.

It could have been Adalind, of course. Just because Nick said she was okay, didn’t mean Trubel wasn’t going to be wary until she knew his hexenbiest a little better.

Adalind had to help him pull the t-shirt on but as soon as he’d tugged it into place he felt better, not so exposed. Though he thought for one crazy moment he caught a look of disappointment on Adalind’s face. He just assumed he was seeing things.

He had six missed calls from Trubel, three from Monroe, one from Rosalee, another from Wu and two from Hank. There were no calls or messages from Juliette. Although he found that strange he didn’t really question it. There was every chance she hadn’t realised he was missing because he had told her he would be working late – which had been the truth, after picking Adalind up and driving her back to the loft he’d been planning to meet Hank and Wu for a little afterhours surveillance.

When he hadn’t turned up he gathered, Hank and Wu had tried calling around to find him. He assumed Trubel had come looking for him because Hank and Wu couldn’t leave their suspect and Monroe and Rosalee were probably checking other places.

He called Hank first and found he’d been correct to assume they were still on the tail of their suspect and after he’d explained (for the most part) what had happened he hung up and called Monroe. Monroe was even easier to assuage because he just accepted the fact that Nick had been jumped and poisoned by the Verrat and asked if there were any bodies that needed to be buried. He’d had to check with Adalind on this one but she shook her head.

After he got off the phone with Monroe, Adalind explained, ‘One of them was still alive when I got you out of there, he’ll clean up the scene for us. They don’t want to go leaving behind evidence of what they did either.’

‘They know where you work,’ he reminded her with concern.

‘I don’t think they’ll be coming after us again.’

Nick eyes her suspiciously. ‘What did you do?’

‘I made sure he had a message to send back to Viktor.’

Nick eyed her for a long moment before he acknowledged he’d have done much the same thing and set it aside to worry about later. Honestly, he just wanted to go home and sleep. Adalind checked on his wounds before she’d let him get up properly and made him take another mouthful of the antidote but then she let him get to his feet and once he’d proven that he was perfectly capable of walking on his own, handed him his jacket, grabbed up his keys and led the way out to the car. Trubel locked the trailer behind them and happily took the backseat.

Adalind glared at him when he made for the driver’s seat and after glaring right back he sighed and instead climbed into the passenger seat. She made Trubel get out to handle the gate but the younger Grimm didn’t seem inclined to argue, it seemed they both agreed he needed to rest. He wished he could show them otherwise but he thought he must have drifted off at some point because it was as though one moment they’d been on the forest road leaving the trailer and the next they were slowing out front of the old paint factory while Adalind waited for the garage door to open so she could pull the car inside.

He glanced behind him to see Trubel looking around with raised eyebrows. ‘You weren’t kidding when you said she wasn’t safe,’ she said when she saw him looking.

Adalind closed the door behind them and cut the engine. ‘Do you want to come up?’ she asked with a glance first to him and then back at Trubel. He hadn’t gotten the chance to ask how she felt about Trubel knowing where she lived or that she was in town but he suspected it was much the same as it had been for Trubel. She was trusting his judgement on this and trying to make the best out of a bad situation.

Nick shook his head. ‘We should just go.’

Adalind nodded and they both reached for the door handles. Adalind shot him a sharp look when he made to get out. ‘You’re not driving,’ she snapped. ‘Trubel can drive you home.’

‘I’m fine,’ Nick protested.

Adalind looked at him and for the first time all night she let him see just how worried and scared she’d been. Alarmed he reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing it gently and hopefully reassuringly. ‘Nick,’ she whispered. ‘You nearly died.’

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll let Trubel drive me home.’

She nodded and pointedly looked at his still open door. With a roll of his eyes he tugged it closed. Satisfied, she pulled her hand free of his grip and stepped out of the car, allowing Trubel to take her place. She smiled awkwardly at Trubel once the girl had shut the door and pulled her seatbelt on. Trubel wound down the window so she could say something to Adalind.

‘Sorry for trying to kill you,’ she said as awkwardly as Adalind had smiled. ‘Thanks for saving Nick.’

Adalind shrugged. ‘You’re not the first person to pull a knife on me,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘I don’t think you’ll be the last either.’

Nick frowned at her words but he couldn’t exactly contradict them. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he told her.

Adalind nodded and then she seemed to remember something because she said, ‘Oh, I’ve found another car I want to look at.’

This time Nick’s frown was really more a scowl. ‘Text me the details and I’ll look into it.’

Adalind rolled her eyes but she didn’t deny him his request. ‘Goodnight, Nick, nice meeting you Trubel.’

Trubel waited until the elevator doors closed on Adalind before she backed out of the garage. Nick closed the door, showing her where he usually stashed the remote while he was at it, and then they fell into silence. Nick assumed it wouldn’t last long and he was right, Trubel only waited until they’d pulled onto the quiet street and out of the industrial lot before she spoke.

‘She’s not what I was expecting.’

Given that Trubel had a history of striking first and asking questions later this wasn’t really a surprise to Nick but he also assumed she was talking more about how she’d heard a lot of bad things about Adalind over the months she’d been staying with them.

‘She’s not trying to kill us anymore,’ Nick explained.

‘That doesn’t mean she has to be nice or that you should be friends with her,’ Trubel pointed out. ‘How did that even happen?’

‘I have no idea,’ Nick admitted. ‘She needed my help and then it just sort of got away from me.’

‘You like her,’ Trubel realised.

‘I know,’ Nick agreed. ‘I don’t know how that happened either.’

‘She cares about you,’ Trubel told him quietly. ‘She was really worried about you, when you were passed out.’

Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I’m the only friend she has, the only person who knows she’s in town. I think I grew on her like she grew on me.’

‘You’ve been spending a lot of time with her,’ Trubel guessed.

Nick shrugged. ‘She’s lonely.’

‘Are you?’

‘What?’

‘Are you lonely?’ Trubel repeated, glancing over at him with that look she got when she was seeing way more than she should. Trubel, unfortunately, was very good at seeing things others didn’t, he supposed it came from a life of being scared and running from the truth. If she didn’t see everything, then she didn’t stay alive.

‘Why would I be lonely?’ Nick asked. ‘I have plenty of friends.’

Trubel shrugged and changed the subject to this new attack on him and Adalind. Nick answered her questions as best he could but her original question continued to nag at him. Was he lonely? He got the feeling Trubel hadn’t been asking about friends, because he did have friends who he could talk to and hang out with, friends who would – and had – followed him into all kinds of messed up wesen craziness.

So why had she asked? In what other way could he possibly be lonely?

When they got home, Trubel cut the engine and then turned to ask him if he planned on telling Juliette about what had happened. His first instinct was to ask her why she thought he wouldn’t but then he realised she wasn’t only thinking of the last conversation they’d had about Reapers but that she was wondering whether or not he wanted to drag Juliette into it.

He hadn’t been planning on telling Juliette, not because he wanted to hide it from her and not even because it had involved Adalind, but because he didn’t want to worry her. He was fine, the poison was well and truly out of his system, the bruises on his back were already easing and the graze on his side (that was really more of a chunk of missing flesh) was itching like mad so he knew it was healing along nicely. There really wasn’t a need to worry her when he was perfectly fine.

‘I don’t want to worry her,’ he told Trubel.

‘Okay.’

That was all Trubel said on the matter but Nick shrugged off her strange attitude and concentrated on walking up the stairs and crawling into bed. Juliette didn’t even stir when he slipped in beside her and she was already up and making breakfast when he woke the next morning.

For a moment he could just lie in bed and think about how much he ached all over before he had to stumble out of bed. He thought about showering but he didn’t know what state his side was in and he thought Adalind might be pissed if he did something to make it worse so he slipped on some clean clothes and settled for brushing his teeth and tidying up his hair.

Trubel and Juliette were sitting at the table eating when he came downstairs but he didn’t join them. He gave an excuse about needing to be at work early, kissed Juliette goodbye and (when she was looking down at her plate) motioned to his side so that Trubel understood he wasn’t making excuses (he was), he just needed to change the bandages without worrying Juliette.

The nod Trubel gave him was oddly speculative in nature but he didn’t give it much thought. He pretty much forgot about it the moment he stepped outside because Adalind called him warning him not to shower until she’d taken a look at his side.

He imagined that was why the first thing she said to him when he stepped into the loft was, ‘Take off your shirt.’

There was a beat in which he thought about all of the other, more fun reasons she would have to order him to remove clothing but he shook them off and did as he was told. Removing his jacket and t-shirt he deposited them on the table before he followed her into the bathroom.

Adalind’s gaze was fixed on his side as she pulled carefully at the tape she’d used to secure the non-stick bandage to his skin. It gave him time to study her closely without feeling like he needed to explain himself. He’d given up pretending he didn’t find her attractive weeks ago. Really he’d always found her attractive, but he was starting to notice that the attraction wasn’t just physical. As much as he wished he could write the whole thing off as his overactive sex drive, the truth was that as much time as he spent daydreaming about her naked or dreaming about the morning they spent together, he spent a lot of time thinking about her in other ways too.

These days, when he came across something weird at work that was potentially wesen related he made his usual call to Monroe and Rosalee but now he found himself wanting to call Adalind as well and not just because he thought she’d know something useful. He liked talking to her about his wesen cases because she liked hearing about them, she found anything new he came across fascinating – he was pretty sure she was still puzzling over that fake-ritual-prayer-to-a-Grimm thing in her spare time.

The truth was, Adalind was really easy to talk to in a way he’d never had before.

‘You’re lucky you heal faster than anyone else I know,’ Adalind told him once the last of the tape had been peeled away to reveal how much healing he’d already done overnight.

In the mirror he could see the wound was well and truly closed and that new skin was already growing in. His side was covered in the remnants of an oatmeal coloured thick paste he assumed Adalind had slapped on to speed up the healing process and keep it from getting infected.

‘You need to shower and wash all of this off before I put fresh bandages on.’

‘You think it needs more?’

‘I don’t think you want your t-shirt rubbing against it all day,’ Adalind said. ‘And I’m sure if I don’t cover it you’ll just spend all day scratching.’

He had to concede she might have a point with that last one. She left the bathroom so he could shower, though he suspected the attempt at privacy was because she still needed to get dressed herself and not because she was worried about seeing him naked.

And he was really, really glad she left him alone to shower because as much as she’d seen it all before he didn’t know that testing his self-control around her was a good idea. He’d already established Adalind made him stupid, he really didn’t need to be that kind of stupid around her.

Of course intentionally not thinking about showering with Adalind wasn’t all that helpful which was probably why he was in a terrible mood all day. He wished he could blame it on the infuriating itching of his side but honestly even he wasn’t that oblivious to his own feelings.

He went to visit Monroe after he’d dropped Adalind at home. Just because he wasn’t willing to tell Juliette he’d been attacked by Verrat (again) didn’t mean he wasn’t going to tell Monroe and Rosalee. They needed to know why the Royals were sending so many people after him, even if it was just because they were trying to find Diana or they’d decided to renew their efforts to find the Keys.

‘How many times have you been attacked?’ Monroe asked, genuinely surprised they were only just now learning about it.

‘I don’t know, maybe six?’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

As he couldn’t exactly explain that he hadn’t been sure whether they were after him or Adalind he just went with, ‘I get attacked all the time, I didn’t think anything of it.’

‘Maybe the first time or the second,’ Monroe allowed. ‘But, Nick, six times?’

‘It might be seven.’

Rosalee rolled her eyes. ‘Do they say anything? Do you know what they’re after?’

Nick shook his head. ‘Mostly they just leap out and try to kill me. There isn’t really time for talking.’

Monroe shrugged. ‘Maybe they just want to kill you. A dead Grimm is usually the only kind of Grimm wesen want.’

‘Yeah but why now?’

That wasn’t a question Monroe or Rosalee could answer but they promised to look into it. Something he asked Bud to do as well when he stopped by on the way home to check in. Bud hadn’t heard any rumours about the Verrat or anyone with a particular interest in Nick but it paid to check and to have Bud keep an ear out. He knew Trubel was already on the lookout for an explanation but Nick expected Bud would have more luck listening to gossip from the wesen community than Trubel would have beating people up.

‘Hey,’ Juliette greeted pleasantly when he walked into the kitchen. ‘How was your day?’

Nick shrugged. ‘Ordinary. What about yours?’

He didn’t tell her about the attack or asking his friends to ask around, he didn’t want to deal with her worry. He was much happier listening to her stories about her patients and their owners. As they sat down to eat, though, he couldn’t help remembering Trubel’s question from the night before.

Was he lonely?


	8. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things between Nick and Juliette are shaken by a few (un)fortunate realisations.

He was worried about Adalind and while he could freely admit this wasn’t a new feeling, it still set him on edge. The last three mornings when he’d picked her she’d looked pale and tired. She did a good job of pretending she was fine but he could be completely honest when he said he knew her pretty well by now and so he saw straight through it. He’d watched her nurse her coffee and nibble her muffin but not actually eat it.

He kept waiting for her to tell him what was wrong but she kept insisting it was nothing, just that work was busy. He didn’t believe her and she knew he didn’t but he didn’t know how to push her. He didn’t know if he could push her. This thing they were doing might have felt perfectly natural and like they’d been doing it for years but it was new.

The fourth morning she looked just as pale and tired but she also looked nervous and he didn’t know what to make of that. Still, he would wait for her to tell him in her own time, it wasn’t like she could avoid him; he was her ride to work every day.

‘I’m picking up my car tonight,’ she told him.

Or not.

He’d looked up the addresses as she’d written them down until they found one he thought was legit and that the seller didn’t have anything to hide and where she liked the car and the price. Apparently someone she worked with had given her the name of the father of a student who’d been violently killed six months ago. He wanted to sell his daughter’s car and due to the circumstances surrounding her death (she’d been shot through the open window of said car blasting her brains all over the interior) he was having a lot of trouble selling it. People seemed to be put off by the car’s history – people but not Adalind.

Only Adalind could manage to find a three-year-old Range Rover in near perfect condition going cheap enough to fit her budget. Well, her budget puffed out by the money she’d gotten selling off her mother’s artwork.

Just because he was impressed by her ability to find exactly what she wanted and get it, didn’t mean he wasn’t annoyed that she’d now have a way to put off telling him what was really wrong for longer. He would no longer need to pick her up in the mornings. There would be no more coffee … dates in his car every morning, no more bouncing ideas off her after work. No more listening to her ramble on happily about her new job and the things she wanted to buy next.

God, he was actually going to miss her. How the hell had that happened?

‘What time do you want me to come and get you?’ he asked, managing not to let his thoughts colour his words.

Adalind shrugged, hands wrapped around the warm tea he’d brought her instead of the usual coffee. She’d actually sipped at this one. ‘Same time. I told Mr Nugent I’d pick it up after work.’

He nodded and the car filled with a silence he was unaccustomed to. There’d been times when they were quiet but they’d never been uncomfortable – which, yes, weird – but this silence felt wrong. ‘Are you ever going to tell me what’s wrong?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not now?’

‘No.’

The fact that she was planning to tell him eased the worry a little but didn’t erase it. He managed not to dwell on it too much throughout the day and even managed to seem genuinely happy for her when they picked up her car. He couldn’t blame her for wanting her independence back, she’d been trapped in the loft dependent on him for long enough. He was surprised she’d lasted as long as she had without lashing out.

He’d have gone nuts cooped up in one place all that time. But Adalind was a survivor and she would do whatever necessary to stay safe and alive. She was very good at it and so if being safe so she could one day be reunited with her daughter meant being trapped in the loft and dependent on a Grimm she’d do it.

He was glad that he’d managed to make it easier for her, that they’d managed to get passed their anger and hurt and all the violence in their past to make the situation work.

It wasn’t the best thing to be thinking about when he was out having an actual date with Juliette but he spent a lot of time thinking about Adalind when he shouldn’t, he was just learning to deal with it.

‘Have you found out anything more about the wesenrein?’ Juliette asked after they’d been seated at the table and given the waiter their drink orders.

They were splashing out for a nicer dinner than normal, three months ago he would have taken the opportunity presented and proposed again. Nothing cheesy and definitely not public but he would have been planning to do it when they got home. Hadn’t Monroe done something similar? He wondered if Juliette was expecting it. She’d been a little surprised when he’d suggested they go out for dinner while Trubel was out helping Bud but she’d also seemed pleased.

God, he hoped she wasn’t expecting a proposal. He was a lot clearer on what he wanted now, Adalind had helped him sort through it all during their drives to work – not to mention numerous coffees and meals. He’d wanted to marry Juliette, had wanted to have kids and pets and the whole white picket fence thing but he couldn’t force Juliette to want those things with him, not the way his life was.

Talking with Adalind had helped because she’d told him what he’d already known. His life would never be normal and so he had to make his own normal. He could still be a Grimm and have a family, that’s what Grimms did. If they hadn’t Nick wouldn’t be around, neither would Josh. His ancestors had never let their work stop them so why should he?

He and Juliette needed to talk, Adalind had kindly reminded him of that, too last time he’d complained to her about Juliette’s comments, but now didn’t seem like the time. He wanted to first show Juliette how, in spite of the violence that sometimes filled his life, there could still be quiet moments. He wanted to show Juliette that the future he wanted was possible. He wanted her to see for herself (before he put all of his cards on the table) that what they had was worth it.

Hence the upscale restaurant with the fancy menu and the ridiculously high price tag. He’d even put on a sports coat, he felt uncomfortable in it but Juliette looked beautiful in her dress so he wasn’t about to complain. The fact that she chose to ask about their wesen friends’ wesen related problems gave him hope. She’d been so open and involved in everything; he wanted to believe she could be open to this future.

‘Trubel and Bud are running down a few leads but no one seems to know much of anything.’

‘I spoke to Rosalee earlier and she told me there’d been more phone calls and threats.’

He’d spoken to Monroe on the drive to pick up Adalind’s new car. His friend had said much the same thing but as much as Nick wished there was, there was nothing he could do until they had more information. He even had Adalind keeping an ear out, not that she was involving herself much with the wesen community these days; it made it too easy to find her.

It was bad enough the Verrat knew where she worked, they didn’t need every wesen who held a grudge tracking her down.

Monroe was sick and tired of having to watch over his shoulder and just wanted somebody to blame, somebody he could target. Nick understood, he did, but they simply didn’t have enough information to get them what they needed.

‘Monroe’s really worried about her,’ Nick explained. ‘He’s been trying to spend as much time at the shop as he can so she’s never alone.’

Juliette nodded, empathy flooding her expression. ‘I can’t imagine what that’s like. Rosalee’s worried it might be someone they thought was a friend.’

Nick shrugged. ‘Doesn’t need to be, Rosalee’s a public figure, a lot of people go to her for remedies and Monroe doesn’t exactly hide, he’s been helping me for years.’

‘Has this kind of thing happened before?’ Juliette sounded surprised by the implication and he frowned. He could have sworn he’d told her about that.

‘He got jumped once, someone put in a fake repair call and there were wesen waiting for him when he got there. They beat him up pretty good for working with me and his ex-girlfriend was once hired to kill him for it.’ He regretted the casual way he’d said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

Juliette’s expression darkened and she glared down at her drink, swirling the wine in her glass. ‘Someone hired his ex-girlfriend to kill him for working with you?’

Had Juliette been around for that? He didn’t think she had, he was sure that had been during her amnesia phase. ‘Technically she killed the men who were originally hired and had to take their place or she’d be killed.’

‘What happened?’

‘She died,’ Nick answered simply. He’d never particularly liked Angelina but she had loved Monroe and in the end she’d died for him. He would always like her for that, if nothing else. He would never have been able to arrest her for all of the people she’d killed anyway, it would have opened up a very big, very ugly can of worms.

Back then, he might not have cared, he’d probably have hauled her in despite the trouble it could cause, but the man he was now would have ignored her past to protect Monroe. It scared him that he might even find it easy.

‘Poor Monroe.’ Juliette murmured. ‘Has anyone else been hurt because they work with you?’ She then asked, she sounded curious but the inflection of her words was all off for just curiosity. ‘I mean Hank thought he was going crazy, Wu committed himself and I had my memory erased. What about Rosalee? Is this the first time someone’s gone after her?’

Nick nodded slowly, answering her question but reading so much more into what she was saying. ‘Is that how you see it?’ he asked quietly, something in his tone must have suggested they needed a moment because he saw the waiter sharply charge direction away from their table at the last moment. ‘Do you see it as though all of that happened because of me?’

‘No,’ she told him but then because that didn’t sound at all convincing she corrected, ‘Not always.’

Just sometimes then, sometimes she looked back on all the bad that had happened and she blamed him. He could understand her holding him responsible for her getting scratched and forgetting him, Adalind had targeted Juliette specifically to get back at him. Hank wasn’t his fault; Nick had no control over all of the wesen that found their way to his desk. He didn’t feel responsible for dragging Hank into it; the universe had done a good enough job of that.

Monroe knew what he was getting himself into when he’d first (grudgingly) started helping but Wu, he could admit to feeling some guilt over. He could admit that putting off telling the sergeant what was really going on was because he didn’t want to involve him. Though he was beginning to recognise how stupid that was. He couldn’t stop Wu from seeing these things but he could help him understand what is was he was seeing.

Wu wasn’t about to stop looking for answers and he was involved whether or not he knew those answers. Nick couldn’t put the truth off forever. He would take responsibility for that but he wouldn’t take responsibility for every bad thing that had happened, that kind of thinking would destroy his ability to do his job – both of them.

‘Have you been thinking about this a lot lately?’ It would certainly explain her weird moods. How sometimes she’d been eager to talk about his wesen work and other times she’d been dismissive or distant. There’d probably been signs but he could admit to being distracted. He was dealing with work, constantly being on edge looking for clues to help Monroe and Rosalee and well, Adalind took up a lot of his time.

He probably should do something about that but now that he wouldn’t be shuttling her to and from work he figured that would sort itself out. Which was probably a good thing because if they’d continued on much longer somebody (other than Trubel) was going to notice and he had no idea how the hell to explain his weird friendship with Adalind.

It did, after all, defy all logic.

It didn’t help that there was something going on with Trubel that she wasn’t talking about. He hoped she wasn’t in trouble, as far as he knew nothing had come of her killing Weston Steward. The FBI had focused on him during the investigation and as Renard had taken a shot to the shoulder and fired off a few of his own, the question of why exactly she’d beheaded him was mostly self-explanatory.

‘Do you really want to talk about this now?’ she asked in a whisper as the waiter tried to approach a second time.

Nick looked up and smiled at him and that made up the man’s mind. They quickly gave their orders and the waiter fled. Nick looked across the table at Juliette. ‘I really don’t,’ he replied honestly. ‘But I think we need to.’

There was that hope that being in public would somehow make this conversation more civilised. There was certainly less of a chance they’d end up in a full-blown argument with so many witnesses.

‘Do you remember that girls’ night I had a few months ago?’

He nodded, he only remembered the night because he’d ended up having dinner with Adalind and moving her into his loft but that probably wasn’t something Juliette wanted to hear.

‘I didn’t realise how long it had been since I’d done something like that,’ she murmured sadly. ‘I’ve become so wrapped up in your work that I don’t see my own friends anymore. My whole life has become about your work; I don’t do anything for myself anymore.’

Feeling a bit defensive, Nick said, ‘I never asked you to turn your back on your friends or the things you used to do.’

‘I know,’ she assured him. ‘But being a Grimm, dealing with wesen, it takes up your whole life – and you like it.’

He didn’t see why that was a bad thing. It wasn’t like he could just stop being a Grimm. No matter where he went there would always be wesen who recognised him for what he was. Some of those wesen would attack him, some would run in fear, it was rare to find those who would stick around long enough to find out he wasn’t like any other Grimm they’d heard about. Being a Grimm was who he was, so what if he’d learned to like that part of himself? So what if he’d just accepted it as another facet of his life?

He wasn’t going to let something he couldn’t, no, wouldn’t change affect his future.

‘It consumes you,’ Juliette went on. ‘And we all just get sucked along in your wake whether we want to or not.’

‘And you don’t want to.’ That was becoming clearer and clearer the more she spoke. He got it, he did, but he wouldn’t apologise for being himself. Since that morning with Adalind where she’d offered him a way out, he’d come to terms with his nature and embraced it more than ever before. He knew what he was and since he’d almost lost it, he was very aware of how much he liked being a Grimm. He liked being able to help people, it made no difference to him if they were wesen or not but being able to see the wesen made it easier.

He didn’t mean to sound like he was tooting his own horn but he kind of felt like the wesen community of Portland needed him. They needed a Grimm who wouldn’t judge them based solely on what type of wesen they were. His best friend was a blutbad, he was friends with a fuchsbau and a hexenbiest and another Grimm. He was also a cop and that gave him a unique position to help the wesen in Portland, not just give them something to fear.

He liked being that Nick, but he was beginning to understand that Juliette didn’t like it.

Just a few months ago, he’d have considered the dinner date the perfect night to propose. He’d have seen it as an opportunity to get started on their future. Actually sitting down to dinner, he was starting to feel as far from proposing as it was possible to be.

This conversation felt a hell of a lot more like a break-up.

All of his thinking about Juliette and his future, he hadn’t really considered what it meant that she might not want the same things he did. He hadn’t thought about what it really meant that maybe she did want those things but would never want them with him. It was easy to think about proposing and not proposing but it was hard to think about the future after. 

Because it hit him there in that restaurant that Juliette couldn’t give him the future he wanted. Juliette would never be truly comfortable with the dangers that came with his life. She would never want to bring children into that life. He didn’t know if she would stay with him, if she would leave him in a year or in five, but eventually she would realise that he couldn’t give her what she wanted, like he had realised she couldn’t give it to him.

‘I love Monroe and Rosalee, they’re wonderful people and I love you, you know I do, but I just wish sometimes that we were normal people.’

‘I don’t.’ There, he’d said it; he’d finally put voice to a truth he’d been putting off for a long time. ‘I don’t want that normal you keep hoping for. I like being a Grimm, I like being able to help wesen.’

‘It’s just, every time I think about the future, every time I think about the things I used to want, I think about Trubel and what she went through, I think about what you went through. I can’t bring a child into a world that has that potential. I won’t.’

His appetite was gone. The waiter placed the steak he’d ordered down in front of him and he couldn’t stomach the thought of eating it. This night had gone in completely the wrong direction. He’d known – how could he not? – that Juliette wasn’t ready to marry him but he hadn’t been ready to face the idea that she would never be ready to marry him.

He started eating anyway, it gave him something else to focus on. His stomach churned and the steak tasted like ashes in his mouth. Across from him, Juliette ate her own pasta. They didn’t look at each other, didn’t know what there was to say. They ate quickly, neither managing to finish their meal before the silence became too much.

‘Can we just go home please?’

Nick nodded, signalling the waiter for the check. The man seemed to understand things were not going well because he brought the check over right away and soon they were outside in the parking lot climbing into Nick’s car.

The car that Adalind had been adding her own touches to for weeks now.

Nick was glad Trubel was out because he couldn’t face the idea of her witnessing the tension between them. Juliette used her own key to open the front door and Nick followed her in automatically. He didn’t go any further inside than the living room, letting her pass through to the kitchen on her own. He heard her putting the kettle on, imagined she was making tea, something she’d probably gotten from Rosalee that was supposed to sooth her and it just felt so hypocritical that he couldn’t stand to be in the house anymore.

He turned around and left without a word. He heard her call after him but he ignored her. Instead he climbed back into his car and drove. He didn’t have a particular destination in mind, he just needed to be anywhere but the house he had purchased with Juliette when he’d been so sure their future contained marriage and kids.

They may not have said the words but deep down he knew they were over. He deserved more than the half future Juliette was willing to give him and she deserved more than what she believed she could get out of a future with him. How stupid that they both wanted the same things but she couldn’t imagine having them with him. Not anymore, not now that he was a Grimm.

Eventually he found himself where he wanted to be all along. He walked up the front path and knocked on the door, realising for the first time how much he took it for granted that Monroe and Rosalee would always be there to welcome him into their home. It didn’t matter the time of day or night, they were always willing to let him in and offer their advice.

He needed that advice; he needed to talk through everything that had been happening lately. It might have been selfish but he needed, just for tonight, to set aside the worries and dangers his friends faced because tonight he needed their help. He needed their advice. He didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. He and Juliette had been together for so long that the idea of facing a future without her was almost inconceivable.

It didn’t matter that he and Adalind had sex while he was still with Juliette; he’d never viewed that as something that would permanently break his relationship. He’d had his reasons for sleeping with her and he’d always believed he could make Juliette understand them. He’d been viewing that as a possible roadblock in his relationship, he’d been preparing for the inevitable day when he would have to come clean. He hadn’t prepared for the time when his relationship would simply fall apart on its own.

‘It’s not wrong to want those things,’ Adalind had told him when he’d called her weeks ago seeking an ear to listen. ‘Why shouldn’t you want a family?’

She’d been telling him exactly what he’d wanted to hear, she’d told him all of the things he’d been thinking and feeling were valid because she saw things as he did. It was why he’d called her. He could have called Monroe, his friend wouldn’t have cared about the wesenrein when he needed advice, but he’d called Adalind because he knew she would have the words he wanted to hear.

Growing up she hadn’t had much of a family, she’d never had the kind of family all kids deserved. He hadn’t either and so he’d known that she wanted that for Diana, that she wanted that for herself one day.

Tonight, though, he needed to talk to Monroe and Rosalee because they wouldn’t necessarily have the same views. As dangerous as things were for them at the moment, they might consider Juliette had a point. Before he took that last step, before he said the words that would end his relationship, he had to know that he was making the right decision.

It wasn’t that he needed his friends to validate his choices, it was just that he needed to know that what he was feeling wasn’t unreasonable. He wanted to know that his decision to end things with Juliette was because they no longer wanted the same things.

He needed to know he was making this decision for himself and not because of Adalind.

It definitely wasn’t something he’d let himself think about and maybe he still shouldn’t be thinking about it, not until he’d sorted out how he felt about Juliette and their future, but he couldn’t deny that there was something there. He and Adalind had chemistry. That was putting it mildly. It wasn’t just that he was still dreaming about the sex, though he was and it was still spectacular, it was that he had spent every morning for months driving her to and from work. It was that they’d had dinner and breakfast and were actually talking for the first time since they’d met.

He liked Adalind. He liked the man he was with her much like he knew she liked the woman she was around him. He talked to her, talked about work and wesen and Diana. They talked about the past and the things they’d done to each other. They talked about what they wanted from the future and what they’d had in the past that made them want those things.

He understood her much like he’d once understood Juliette but the difference was Juliette no longer understood him. Adalind did. Adalind understood what drove him to do the things he did, she may have spent the last three years trying to kill him and fighting against him but that gave her a unique insight into his actions, much like that time spent fighting her gave him a chance to know her.

He wanted to believe his decision to break things off with Juliette was based solely on his desire to have that future with a wife and kids but he couldn’t deny that what he was feeling for Adalind was also a factor. He didn’t love her, sometimes he wasn’t even sure he liked her, but he respected her, he was attracted to her (attraction may have been an understatement if he were honest) and there was a big part of him that wanted to see where that could lead.

Of course, as he walked up to Monroe’s front door and knocked he realised he couldn’t expect his friend to have the answers he was seeking. He didn’t expect them to do much more than stare at him in astonishment when he laid it all out for them. He’d kept all of this from his friends because it hadn’t been something he thought was worth worrying over.

If he were being honest, and it seemed to be the night for it, he’d just assumed Juliette would get over it, that she’d change her mind.

It had never occurred to him that he would. It wasn’t like he’d chosen a safe and easy career path before he’d discovered he was a Grimm. He’d always known the risks, that he could be injured or killed on the job and be leaving a wife and kids alone but he’d come to terms with that. He didn’t see how being a Grimm changed that because for him it didn’t.

Had Juliette always felt that way? Had she never really considered what a future with a homicide detective would be like when she’d moved in with him? He’d been in uniform when they’d met but that didn’t mean he was any less likely to get hurt on the job, did it? Had she been so taken with him, so in love that she didn’t consider the world she would be bringing a child into?

The first time she’d turned down his proposal he’d thought it was just because he’d been keeping things from her. His behaviour hadn’t gone unnoticed, as much as he’d tried to hide it from her, she could hardly fail to notice how distracted he was when his already irregular hours had spun out of control. She hadn’t missed that he’d made a new friend in Monroe and that he was ignoring all of his other friends.

Looking back on it, he understood now why she’d been so insistent on meeting Monroe. She’d probably hoped meeting Monroe would help her make sense of the changes in him. That must have been a serious disappointment for her when that dinner had only raised more questions. Monroe was nothing like the other friends Nick had before. To Nick, that was a good thing but back then for Juliette it would have only been more confusing.

It actually amused him now, thinking back on it. He and Monroe had been so nervous of rousing Juliette’s suspicions that they’d probably (definitely) only made things worse.

He remembered his Aunt’s words though, how she’d told him to let Juliette go. He hadn’t understood her meaning back then and after Marie died he’d had other things on his mind but now he could look back at the way he’d hidden things from Juliette and could only concede that maybe his Aunt Marie had been right. Maybe if he’d taken her advice then things would have been different.

It was hard to image but perhaps he’d have met someone who understood what it meant to be a Grimm, someone who wouldn’t let that stop them from having kids, from settling down. He wondered if Juliette would have understood, would she have found someone else to give her the things she wanted?

He supposed he’d never know. He’d made the decision to ignore Aunt Marie’s advice and taken his mother’s words to heart instead. That advice had led him to Monroe’s doorstep seeking advice when really he already knew what he would do.

Monroe answered the door, smiling cautiously. The smile said he was happy to see Nick but that happiness would only last so long if he needed their help instead of just stopping by for a friendly visit.

‘Nick?’ he said when Nick failed to say anything.

What was he supposed to say? Where did he even start? Did he start with his and Juliette’s possible break up or the conversation they’d had the night of his and Rosalee’s wedding? Did he start with the fact that he and Juliette wanted the same things but that she could no longer imagine having them with him? Or did he start from the beginning and just lay it all out?

He supposed, starting from the beginning was the only way to go. That didn’t mean he couldn’t have done it a little better than just blurting it out.

‘I slept with Adalind.’


	9. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick comes clean to Monroe and Rosalee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had so much fun writing this chapter.

‘I slept with Adalind.’

Monroe’s eyes widened, his mouth dropped open and he all but yelped, ‘What?!’

In hindsight, a little more lead up might have been necessary to avoid giving Monroe a heart attack. Or the impression he’d lost his mind. ‘I slept with Adalind,’ Nick repeated, committing now. ‘Twice.’

‘Honey,’ Monroe called back into the house, he sounded alarmed. ‘Nick’s here.’

Nick shifted uncomfortably, still standing on the doorstep waiting for Monroe to move back and let him in. He was very aware of the way Monroe was looking at him and he tried not to look apologetic or defiant. It was surprisingly hard to act like those words were perfectly reasonable and not at all something that sounded like the preface to the apocalypse.

Rosalee appeared next to her husband. She smiled at Nick and said, ‘Hey Nick, aren’t you coming in?’

‘Nick slept with Adalind,’ Monroe told her. ‘Twice.’

‘You what?!’ That was definitely a shriek. Nick winced and then glanced back over his shoulder just to make sure the whole neighbourhood hadn’t suddenly been woken by her words.

‘Look, can I come in?’

They both nodded and wordlessly stepped back to let him in. They followed him into the living room on autopilot, still gaping at him like he’d gone insane. He got it, he really did but if they could just move passed the absurdity of his sleeping with Adalind this whole conversation would be a lot easier.

‘You slept with Adalind?’ Rosalee hissed, like she couldn’t hold it in anymore.

‘I need a drink,’ Monroe muttered, walking out of the room.

Nick felt like he could use one too. He slumped into the armchair and watched Rosalee ease down onto the couch trying to look calm and rational when he could tell she wanted to reach out and shake him. Monroe returned really quickly with a bottle of scotch, three glasses and a couple of bottles of beer. That said a lot about how he felt this conversation was going to go.

Nick took the glass offered, downed the contents in one swallow and tried not to notice the burn or the way his eyes wanted to water. Then he took a beer.

‘You slept with Adalind?’ Rosalee demanded. ‘Twice?!’

‘It was necessary,’ Nick said, feeling defensive even though he didn’t regret what he’d done.

Monroe scoffed and Rosalee narrowed her eyes. ‘How is sleeping with the enemy necessary?’

If she could stop saying everything with that edge of hysteria he’d really appreciate it. It was hard enough having this conversation without feeling like they were judging him. Once he explained he knew they’d understand, well, they’d understand why he’d slept with her. He wasn’t sure they’d understand why he’d then befriended her, given her a home, driven her to work and developed some sort of feelings for her.

God this was a mess.

‘Look,’ Nick began, ‘I’ll explain everything just don’t interrupt. Please.’

They each took a drink, sat back on the couch and looked at him expectantly. No pressure then.

‘It started on your wedding day,’ he told them and watched the way they both opened their mouths to make a comment and then thought better of it. ‘She came to the house disguised as Juliette and seduced me. She made some sort of potion that physically changed her to look like Juliette and well, I wasn’t about to turn down morning sex.’

He winced at his words but they were true, he remembered how happy he’d been that Juliette was being spontaneous, that she was showing him that she still cared even after all the shit they’d been through. Now, it felt like the joke was on him for so many reasons.

‘I said something after, while she was in the bathroom, something about hearing from my mother about her and Diana being safe and she got this look on her face, like she was going to be sick, and then she said something, I don’t even really remember what and I knew it was Adalind, even though she looked like Juliette.

‘We had this huge fight, things got thrown, words got said, and it all came out that she’d made this deal with the Royals to strip me of my powers in exchange for being with Diana.’

‘But the Royals didn’t have Diana,’ Rosalee realised. ‘And you’re still a Grimm.’

‘There was a way to undo what she’d done but it involved sleeping with her again as herself.’

‘So you took one for the team?’ Monroe snorted. ‘Unbelievable.’

Nick glared at him but Monroe didn’t look the least bit sorry, he supposed that was why he’d come to his friends in the first place. He needed the dose of reality they could provide.

‘We went our separate ways and swore never to speak of it.’

‘I’m sensing a but,’ Rosalee murmured.

Nick smiled wryly. ‘She called me a few nights before you came home from your honeymoon; she was attacked in her motel room by a hundjager. When I got there she was lying on the floor with her head cracked open and the hundjager standing over her with a tyre iron.’

With all these new feelings flowing around the memory made him feel sick. He could remember how little he’d cared whether or not she was alive and it just seemed so wrong now that he actually knew her. Adalind deserved so much better than being brained on the floor of a motel room.

‘I took her to the hospital – she needed six stiches – and then we buried the body.’ He failed to mention that he let her spend the night in their house, he was trying to win them over here, trying to make them understand and he didn’t think that would help his cause.

‘And that was it?’ Monroe asked hopefully.

Nick titled his head back and sighed. It was easier to look at the ceiling than meet his friends’ eyes. ‘She’s living in a loft I brought, it was supposed to be a safe place I could go if things ever got bad. I’ve been driving her to and from work every day for the last two months.’

After a long, heavy silence Monroe awkwardly cleared his throat and said, ‘Well, that’s, that’s … honey?’ He looked to Rosalee for help but she seemed to be just as lost for words.

‘There’s more.’

‘More.’ Rosalee sounded incredulous. She took another sip of her drink and steeled herself. ‘Alright, we’re listening.’

‘I think things between Juliette and I are over.’

Monroe gave a humourless laugh. ‘Well, you did sleep with another woman.’

Nick winced. ‘Juliette doesn’t know about that.’

‘What?’ Monroe gave him a disapproving look. ‘How could you not tell her?’

‘If Juliette doesn’t know then why do you think your relationship is over?’ Rosalee asked, seeing the point Monroe was still too confounded to.

‘Remember the night the wesenrein set your lawn on fire?’

‘It’s kind of hard to forget,’ Monroe replied.

‘That night we had this fight, not even a fight really, I don’t know how to describe it. She started asking me if I ever thought about what our lives would be like if I weren’t a Grimm. If I thought we’d be married with kids, that kind of thing.’

He told them about all of the talks he and Juliette had had over the last few months, all of the times she’d commented about how much she wanted a normal life, how she missed the things they used to do. He told them about their dinner and what had driven him to their doorstep, trying to make them understand that he and Juliette wanted the same things but that she didn’t see herself having those things with him if he was a Grimm.

‘Man, I’m sorry,’ Monroe empathised. ‘That sucks.’

‘How can I be with her if she doesn’t want those things with me?’ Nick asked.

‘She might change her mind,’ Rosalee offered, trying to make him feel better.

‘What if she doesn’t and suddenly it’s too late?’ he countered. ‘Is it fair to either of us to hold on to something that is never going to give us what we want?’

‘No,’ Rosalee sighed, ‘it’s not. But Nick, you and Juliette have been through rough patches before. How do you know this isn’t another one of those times? How do you know what’s happening to Monroe and I doesn’t have her scared?’

‘I don’t,’ Nick admitted. ‘But I’m tired of feeling like I’m all in while Juliette has one foot out the door.’

He could tell as soon as he said them how true those words were. Juliette had thrown herself into his work as a Grimm, helping out when she could and just being there for support when she couldn’t but now it felt like she was compensating for everything she’d put him through when she’d lost her memories of him. He’d never asked her to get involved, never really wanted her to be involved and now it felt like she was using it as an excuse.

He’d moved out of the house for a reason back then and he’d only come back when she’d invited him, he’d stayed out of her life until she pushed her way back into his. That was all on her so why was she blaming him for all that had gone wrong in her life? She’d chosen to regain her memories; she’d chosen to become so involved in his Grimm work. That was on her.

‘Is that how you really feel?’ Rosalee checked.

‘This whole thing might just have been blown out of proportion,’ Monroe pointed out.

‘I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who thinks that everything happening to my friends is because of me.’

‘She really said that?’ Rosalee asked and Monroe gave a low whistle when he nodded. ‘You know we don’t feel that way, though, right?’

Nick nodded. ‘I know. Monroe would have walked away a long time ago if that were how you felt.’

Monroe nodded. ‘It’s true.’

He’d known before that Monroe didn’t feel that way, they’d had that conversation when Monroe had been beaten the first time, but it was nice to have it confirmed again and to know that it was true for Rosalee too.

His phone rang then and he knew who it was before he checked the caller ID. Juliette had apparently decided she’d given him long enough but he wasn’t ready to talk to her just yet. There were so many things he still wasn’t sure of, so many things he still wanted the chance to think on. He declined the call and dropped his phone down on the coffee table.

‘Are you really sure this is what you want?’ Monroe asked. ‘I mean, this is Juliette we’re talking about.’

‘I know.’ Nick sighed tiredly, scrubbing a hand over his jaw and feeling the reminder that he’d shaved especially for his date tonight. ‘But I’m tired of always being on edge and worried that something I do is going to push her away.’

Monroe nodded; Nick imagined he had some idea of what he was going through because his relationship with Rosalee would have come with a few questions along the way. The difference was, Monroe had easily overlooked all of the things his friends and family had pointed out when he’d chosen to marry a fuchsbau, they simply didn’t mean anything to him because Rosalee meant more. Nick never felt like that with Juliette, it felt like all of the reasons why they were a bad idea carried a lot more weight in their relationship than the good reasons.

His phone rang again and he leant forward and declined it again. ‘I need to do this; I need to be with someone I know wants that future with me not someone who might one day change their mind.’

Rosalee narrowed her eyes at him. ‘This isn’t about Adalind, is it?’

Nick shook his head. Just because getting to know Adalind had opened him up to seeing these things he really wanted, just because their friendship had pushed him to not be so blind to Juliette’s faults, didn’t mean he would let what he was feeling for her destroy his relationship with Juliette. He and Juliette had done a pretty good job of that on their own.

‘I like Adalind,’ Nick told them with a shrug. ‘But I only just stopped hating her, I’m not about to throw away seven years with Juliette because Adalind and I have great sex.’

‘Have?’ Rosalee latched onto the present tense accusingly.

‘Had,’ Nick replied firmly. ‘We had sex twice and it was good, really good, but as mad as I am at Juliette, I’m perfectly aware you can’t build a relationship on fantastic sex.’

Apparently though, you could keep repeating it in your head until you were thinking about doing it again. Nick shook his head, now really wasn’t the time to be wondering if Adalind would be open to the idea if Juliette wasn’t in the picture. He wasn’t even sure he was open to the idea; it was just that things were really confusing right now and Adalind, as complicated as she was, was someone he always knew where he stood with.

‘What’s that like?’ Monroe asked suddenly and when Rosalee’s eyebrows shot up and Nick frowned at him, he hastily clarified. ‘Being friends with Adalind. I mean, you just said you’ve been taking her to work every day.’

Nick opened his mouth, couldn’t come up with a word to perfectly describe the experience, and shut it again. How did he describe it? He wasn’t even really sure how it had happened. Sure, it was partly his fault for not wanting anyone to know the location of the loft and Adalind certainly didn’t want anyone else trying to kill her, but how had that translated to carpooling? To coffee and breakfast and trading stories and small talk like they’d known each other for years?

Well, liked each other for years, they’d certainly known each other long enough, they’d just spent most of that time trying to kill each other.

‘It’s easy,’ he said finally. ‘I can tell her anything and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t judge. And she knows some really random things that have really helped me out on a couple of cases. When I talk to her it’s like talking to you guys, I’m not worrying that something I say is going to send her running.’

Monroe and Rosalee exchanged looks, one of those looks that spoke volumes but only if you were able to speak the language. Nick didn’t know how to interpret the look, not exactly, but he got the feeling they were having a silent discussion about his fondness for Adalind. Strangely, he didn’t mind. They hadn’t just dismissed what he was thinking or feeling and told him to go home to Juliette and that meant more than some silly look passed between them.

His phone rang again. This time he just let it dance silently across the tabletop until it rang out. They all just watched its progress, not speaking until it had finished ringing. He wondered if Juliette would leave him a voicemail. He hoped she didn’t.

‘You have to talk to her, Nick,’ Rosalee gently rebuked him. ‘You can’t put this off for too long.’

‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘Can I go back to the house and break things off or am I supposed to wait?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ Rosalee responded. ‘But if it were me, I wouldn’t want to be the one watching you let go without making it a clean break.’

He’d already known the answer, just needed somebody else to push him to make the choice. He couldn’t go back to her, crawl into bed beside her and wait for her to wake up the next morning and pretend like it had never happened. Not this time. That meant going home and talking to her, it meant telling her everything he’d come to realise.

It meant ending their relationship after so many years.

‘I should go.’

‘Nick, I’m really sorry, dude,’ Monroe clapped a hand on his shoulder as he opened the front door.

‘Thanks.’ Nick tried to smile but he suspected it came out as more of a grimace.

His phone rang once more on the drive but he continued to ignore it. This was a conversation they needed to have face to face, he wouldn’t hurt Juliette by having even the precursor over the phone.

She was waiting for him when he walked through the front door. She was sitting on the couch failing to distract herself with a book. A large glass of red wine sat on the table, mostly untouched and she looked up when he came through the door. She looked awful and she’d clearly been crying, part of him wanted to apologise for walking out, to hold her and make it all better but if he did that then soon they would be right back to ignoring the problem and Nick was tired of doing that.

‘Hey,’ she greeted him quietly.

‘Hey.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Monroe and Rosalee’s.’

‘Oh.’

He walked further into the room and sat down beside her on the couch. He didn’t look at her but she turned sideways to face him, back resting against the arm of the couch, one foot on the floor and the other crossed beneath her.

‘We need to talk.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t keep doing this, Juliette,’ he told her honestly. ‘I can’t keep ignoring the fact that you’re not comfortable marrying me, having children with me.’

‘I want to do those things with you,’ Juliette tried to assure him but her words lacked conviction.

‘No,’ he shook his head, finally turning to look at her. ‘You want to have those things with the Nick you first met. You don’t want those things with the Grimm.’

Juliette flinched and he knew for certain that she’d come to see that to. At least he was owning up to it now and not shying away from it or pretending that things would somehow be different in the future.

‘I want to have that future with you,’ she told him again, voice strong despite the hush of her words. She wasn’t crying now. ‘I want to want those things with you but I can’t. I don’t want my children growing up in this world, I don’t want them constantly in danger because of wesen and who you are.’

‘I know,’ Nick told her. ‘It’s why I’m done.’

‘What?’ there was a strange hopeful note in her voice and Nick realised she’d mistaken his meaning.

‘I’m done pretending I’m ever going to be something I’m not just because I don’t want to lose you. I deserve to have that future Juliette and I deserve to be with someone who wants to give it to me, who wants it too.’

‘Nick,’ Juliette tried to interrupt him but he wasn’t finished.

‘And you deserve the same thing. I like being a Grimm, it’s not just what I am, it’s who I am. I’m not going to let that stop me from living my life, there’s no reason it should. But you can’t give me that and I’m never going to be able to give you that quiet life you want. I’m done pretending we’ll work it out.

‘I love you, Juliette, I do, but I have to stop pretending one day you’re going to love the Grimm and stop wishing I was the old Nick.’

Now Juliette did start to cry, fat silent tears sliding down her cheeks as she struggled to form the words that he gathered were supposed to make him want to stay.

‘I love you,’ Juliette assured him. ‘We can make this work, maybe one day things will be different, your work won’t be so bad.’

‘It’s always going to be bad,’ Nick pointed out. ‘I’m not just a Grimm, Juliette, I’m a cop. I work homicide and robbery; it’s not exactly a safe job.’

She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. ‘I know that, I knew that when I met you.’

‘Did you think having children with a cop would be safe?’ he wondered. ‘Anything could have happened and one day I might not have come home. I could have been shot on the job and you could have been left at home to raise our kids.’

‘That’s different,’ Juliette tried to tell him.

‘How?’ he demanded. ‘How is that any different from the risks now of being a Grimm?’

‘You never brought your work home with you as a cop!’ Juliette snapped. ‘It never followed you home. But then everything changed and you became a Grimm and suddenly our house was getting broken into and you were getting beaten up and shot at. That wasn’t happening before!’

Nick sighed. Things might have been worse the last couple of years since he’d become a Grimm and yes, he’d accidentally brought a lot of that home with him but that was why he’d purchased the loft. It was why he’d moved the trailer out into the woods. He was getting better at thinking like a Grimm and not just a cop, he was getting better at hiding and walking the line between right and wrong. He knew now when to kill someone and when to let them go.

Being a Grimm and dealing with wesen changed all the rules, he knew that now too and he could be the kind of man who dealt in shades of grey. That was what made it safer now more than it had been back then. He knew how to look out for himself and his friends and family now, he knew what to look for and how better to defend against it.

But Juliette would never see that. She’d never know about the loft or the bank accounts, the stashes of cash and weapons he was starting to leave around the city. He would never tell her the things he had done to keep them safe from the Royals over the years because she wouldn’t want to know about the people he’d killed the bodies he’d buried. There was only so much Juliette was willing to overlook before it started to eat away at her conscience.

She was a good person and he didn’t want to risk ruining that by continuing to expose her to things she didn’t like and didn’t want to accept. Because she would, she’d stand beside him and fight beside him when she should have been home safe in bed because she wouldn’t know how to let go. If she’d known, she would never have fought so hard to regain her memories. If she had, she never would have let all of the ruined dates, the times she found herself out in the dark hunting down killers, go on for so long.

‘But it was always going to be a possibility the longer I worked, the more I made a name for myself.’

‘I would have dealt with that.’

‘Like you’re dealing now?’ he snapped. ‘I’m so tired of constantly worrying that something I do is going to push you away. I’m tired of worrying that you’re going to look at me one day and realise all the things you threw away and I’m tired of looking at you and seeing all the things I can never have. I don’t have a future with you Juliette, not the kind either of us deserve.’

‘That’s not true!’ Juliette insisted. ‘We do have a future together.’

‘Do you really believe that? He asked. ‘Or are you so comfortable with the way things are that you’re just saying it because you’re scared of things changing?’

Juliette opened her mouth and then snapped it closed. It seemed like his words had finally hit home because the tears stopped and she was looking at him in a way she’d never looked at him before. It looked like, for the first time, she was actually seeing him and realising that maybe there was some truth to what he was saying.

‘I do love you,’ she insisted.

‘I know,’ Nick assured her. ‘But it’s not enough.’

They sat in silence for long horrible moments. It was so hard to think of anything to say that hadn’t already been said or that wouldn’t somehow make things worse.

‘What do we do now?’ Juliette asked in a whisper.

‘I’m going to move out,’ Nick said, he’d thought about it a lot on the drive home, what they would do and he knew he couldn’t really kick her out. He also knew that he had somewhere safe he could go where, so far, people and wesen couldn’t find him. He needed that safety and Juliette needed the normality of the house.

‘Where will you go?’ she asked and he noticed she didn’t try to stop him.

‘I’ll stay with a friend.’ He wasn’t exactly sure how happy that friend would be to suddenly have him crashing on her couch but technically she was living in his place and not paying any rent so he wasn’t sure she could complain.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,’ she murmured. ‘What am I supposed to say?’

Nick shrugged. Just because he’d known this was coming, probably for a lot longer than he was willing to admit, didn’t mean he knew what to do now. Walking away from Juliette wasn’t as easy as it sounded but all of the things they needed to deal with – the house, the bills – could all be dealt with later, once they’d had some time to get used to the idea of being apart.

Now, all he wanted was to grab a bag and be away from the reminder of all the things they’d had and would never have.

She followed him up the stairs and sat on the bed while he shoved as many clothes and belongings as he could into a duffel bag. She didn’t really say anything but he could feel the weight of all the things she didn’t say resting heavily on his shoulders as he placed his toothbrush, razor and assorted toiletries into the bag he used whenever they went away for the weekend.

‘This is really it, isn’t it?’ she sounded stunned, like she couldn’t believe that even after all the words they’d exchanged he was really leaving.

He shoved the bag of toiletries into the duffel bag and added a few more pairs of socks and the last of his underwear. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It is.’

It was amazing how much of his life could fit into that duffel bag. When he really thought about it, he didn’t need any of the things he’d accumulated over the years. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had time to sit down and read a whole book or get into a television series. He and Juliette hadn’t been to a movie in months. He hadn’t realised how little a life he had outside of work until she’d pointed it out to him.

He didn’t know what was worse; that he didn’t have much of a life or that he hadn’t noticed how much of his life he’d let go of since becoming a Grimm.

He’d never looked at it that way before, still didn’t if he were being honest. If he’d never become a Grimm he’d never have met Monroe, never have met Rosalee or Bud. He’d built friendships with all three of them through his work and he couldn’t imagine his life without them in it. He’d never noticed how much of his old social life he’d let go of because in his mind he’d built a better one.

His friendship with Monroe was one of the strongest relationships he’d ever had and he wouldn’t turn his back on that just because Juliette wanted a normal life. He definitely couldn’t regret how working with him had led to Monroe and Rosalee meeting.

He did wonder if he’d have met Adalind, though. Would he have still been assigned to her case, would he have even been able to protect her and follow the clues to solve the case if he didn’t know what he was really dealing with?

Bizarrely, he much preferred the way their relationship had started if it meant she’d have lived to become his friend. She certainly gave his life some excitement over the years, and she was definitely a challenge. Though, to be honest, being friends with her was often just as challenging.

He packed up the last of the things he planned to take and zipped up the bag. Juliette was on her feet now watching him anxiously, not seeming to know what to do or say. He could relate.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she told him. ‘We can make this work.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘we really can’t.’

He wouldn’t make her try, that wasn’t fair to either of them. He knew she would and that years from now they’d both regret it.

‘Goodbye Nick.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She watched him through the front window as he threw the duffel into the backseat and then climbed into the driver seat. He didn’t wave goodbye, he didn’t look back at her, he simply drove away. Looking at her would have been hard but it wouldn’t have changed his mind. He’d done the right thing, breaking off their relationship, he knew that.

Didn’t mean it wasn’t hard. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t wake up in the morning regretting how it had ended. It just wouldn’t change the fact that it needed to be done. It wouldn’t change the fact that he and Juliette had only been playing at happy for a while now.

At a red light, he texted Adalind to warn her he was coming and that he’d be taking the couch. He didn’t get a response and, given how tired she’d been lately, he hadn’t really expected one, but it was enough that he’d warned her. He let himself in when he arrived and was surprised to find her waiting for him. It looked like she’d only gotten up when she’d heard the elevator.

‘Juliette and I broke up,’ he said by way of explanation and a greeting.

Adalind just nodded tiredly. ‘Come to bed,’ she told him. ‘You can’t stay on the couch.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he tried to tell her, dropping his duffel bag by the elevator.

‘Nick,’ she said tiredly. ‘Come to bed.’


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adalind finally comes clean about what's wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the Kudos! I missed a couple of days so here's a couple of chapters.

Necessary Sins – Chapter 9

 

Adalind wasn’t lying beside him when he woke. He was grateful. To be fair, he had started out on the couch but she’d been right when she said he couldn’t sleep there. It was too short, too uncomfortable and it had felt a little stupid to lie there failing to sleep when he knew he was welcome to sleep in a nice warm, comfortable bed. She hadn’t even stirred when he slid into bed beside her; he’d been as careful and quiet as he could be navigating the unfamiliar room in the dark. At some point he thought she’d rolled toward him but he couldn’t be sure.

He rolled onto his back and considered what he was supposed to do now. Walking away from Juliette had seemed so simple, so black and white, in the moment but now there were things to consider, arrangements to be made. He wondered if he’d start to regret the decision. It had crossed his mind, as he was struggling to get comfortable on the couch, that come morning and with a clear head, he might come to regret just walking out on years of history.

Well, morning had come and he didn’t regret it. It was comforting to know that in the harsh light of day he didn’t regret his choice. He probably could have found a better way to go about it but if it hadn’t been last night then he imagined there would have been a lot more putting it off, pushing it further away until, despite all his intentions, they’d end up that unhappy, unmarried, childless couple neither of them wanted to be.

This was better. It hurt and it kind of left him feeling adrift, with no idea what he was supposed to do next, but it was better than that cold and unfulfilling future.

‘I see the couch worked out well.’

Nick pushed up onto his elbows, the covers slipping down to his hips, and shot Adalind a glare. She seemed more amused than anything else but offered him a mug of coffee to ease the sting. He sat up against the headboard and accepted the coffee. She couldn’t have been up long because she hadn’t showered yet, she was still in the pyjamas she’d been wearing when he arrived and her hair was a tangled mess.

Some part of him registered how strange it wasn’t to see Adalind so bare, no make-up, no armour of clothes and confident attitude to face the day. When had they both gotten so comfortable they’d given up on pretences? He thought nothing of sitting there in a bed they’d just shared in just a pair of cotton pyjama pants.

She took a sip from her own mug and regarded him with a concerned expression. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’

He thought about not telling her, about shrugging it off until he’d properly gotten his head around it but what would that achieve? Unlike Monroe and Rosalee, Adalind knew he was having issues with Juliette, she’d been the one he called when he’d first realised things weren’t as good as he’d thought. She’d been the one to listen to him complain when an innocent comment made by Juliette had him questioning everything.

‘I broke up with Juliette.’

‘Oh,’ Adalind said with surprise, a lot more surprise than he thought there should have been given how much she knew and that he’d told her as much the night before.

‘You’re surprised.’

‘Well,’ she started, choosing her words carefully. ‘I know you’ve been worried that you wanted different things but,’ she shrugged, ‘it’s Juliette. I guess I just assumed you’d work it out.’

Nick frowned. Had she sounded bitter when she said that? No, he was obviously just annoyed that she had thought the same as Monroe and Rosalee and was reading more into it. He was annoyed that they all just assumed that because he and Juliette had been together for so long they would just magically find a solution to this problem. Was that really how they saw his relationship with Juliette? That it was so strong, so permanent, that they all saw this as another speed bump along the way. Like losing her memory and learning about wesen, this was just another issue for them to overcome?

It didn’t feel that way to Nick but maybe that was because the more he sat there and thought about it the more he realised he didn’t want to overcome it. He’d seen what Monroe and Rosalee had, that kind of unconditional love that had managed to see passed the fact that they were a blutbad and a fuchsbau. He’d witnessed, once or twice, the relationship Bud had with his wife, he wanted that. He wanted someone who was going to find his quirks endearing and his faults so irritating it caused stupid meaningless fights and compromises that built a stronger relationship.

He couldn’t remember ever having something like that with Juliette. Not since he’d become a Grimm, at least. She’d had to put up with a lot, change a lot to fit in with his life but he really hadn’t. In retrospect, being a Grimm had come so easily to him that he’d barely noticed when he stopped seeing their friends, stopped turning up to dinners and parties. His life had suddenly had so much more meaning, that those things hadn’t much mattered anymore.

But they had for Juliette. For the most part she’d had to give up a lot of her friends and her life because it simply didn’t fit with his. He’d never asked her to, never wanted her to, but she was right, his world was all-consuming, being a Grimm took over every facet of his life. Look what it had done to Monroe and Rosalee, their nights were interrupted more often than not by some new wesen threat or criminal activity.

He’d never once heard them complain, not seriously anyway, but he’d seen for himself at their wedding that helping him hadn’t really slowed their outside lives down, if anything it had strengthened their ties to the greater wesen community. It had certainly created stronger ties for him over the course of the last three years. In becoming a Grimm he’d found friends in people he would never otherwise have met but at the same time he’d grown distant from people he’d once been close to.

He just didn’t really care. It probably said a lot about the relationships he’d built with those friends that he hadn’t even noticed them slip from his life. It also said something about his relationship with Juliette that she’d never said anything until now.

Was she protecting their friends? Was that why she’d never pointed it out until now? Was she hoping that by keeping her distance, by keeping him away, that her friends would stay safe and well out of reach of his wesen enemies?

And why had he never considered any of this before?

‘I guess I’ve been assuming this would work out too, but last night I finally realised that it’s not just that I don’t think things will work out, it’s that I don’t want them too.’

Adalind gave him a sceptical look. He couldn’t blame her. ‘I don’t think it’s as easy as that,’ she murmured. ‘It’s not just you in this relationship.’

‘That’s the problem,’ he said darkly, ‘I think for a while it has been.’

‘You still think you’re more invested than she is?’

‘I know I was.’ He was deliberately using past tense and knew she was picking up on it, he suspected that was why she insisted on sticking with present tense.

‘Juliette loves you Nick, she’s not going to walk away from your relationship just because you had a fight. You’ll go home, you’ll talk and you’ll realise this was all just a silly mistake.’

Now that was definitely bitterness he was detecting in her tone and though he wanted to guess at its meaning he was afraid what it might mean. If he examined it too closely then he’d have to examine other things he wasn’t going to think about just then. Or ever. Well, any time soon at least.

He cleared his throat nervously, suddenly very aware of how intimate this felt, sitting on a bed they’d just shared, talking about a relationship (which, alright wasn’t theirs) in pyjamas with coffee because there was a spark taking hold in his chest that tasted dangerously like a what if. What if this was about them? What if they weren’t just Nick and Adalind but Nick and Adalind?

‘I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes again and again,’ he said finally. ‘Loving her isn’t enough anymore.’

Adalind still didn’t seem convinced but his phone rang then, out in the open living room where he’d left it on the coffee table. Either it was Juliette with her own regrets or it was work. He really hoped it was the latter and was rewarded when he finally reached down to scoop it up (and Jesus was the floor of the loft cold) and saw Hank’s name on the caller ID.

‘Don’t think this is over,’ she warned, once he’d gotten the necessary details from Hank.

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘I need to grab a quick shower and then I’ll be out of your way.’ He made a beeline for the bathroom but paused when she called his name. ‘Yeah?’

‘You’re not in the way.’

He didn’t think about how it sounded that he said goodbye with a quick, ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ as he pulled down the grate in the elevator. He didn’t think about how easy their conversation had been or how easily they’d fallen into sharing the small space. They just did it. He supposed it came of spending so much time together, of getting to know each other in a completely backwards fashion, but things with Adalind, fighting with her or not, always seemed to come easy to him.

And there was that thought again, that what if, that he was absolutely not going to think about. He’d think about their fresh homicide instead. It was much safer.

He didn’t realise how normal he was acting; how little he was letting his break-up with Juliette affect his work or his day until the entire day had passed without a single concerned comment from Hank or Wu. They were both observant people and they hadn’t once looked at him with a shrewd look and words of concern or sympathy. He wondered what it said about him that his closest friends didn’t notice anything different about his behaviour. He didn’t think he was that great of an actor, then again, they hadn’t once noticed over the last two months that he’d been spending a lot of time with another woman or that the woman taking up all of his spare time was Adalind.

So were they being unobservant or was he just better at masking his feelings and actions than he thought? Or worse, had his break-up with Juliette really made so little an impact on him?

He really hoped it wasn’t that last one. Just because he’d been preparing for it, just because he’d half been expecting it, didn’t mean he wanted to be so okay with it that no one even realised something had happened. It wasn’t that he wanted to make a big deal about it, quite the opposite, but he felt like someone should have noticed, that someone should have seen something in the way he winced every time his phone rang.

He wondered what Juliette had told Trubel when she eventually finished up her work with Bud, he wondered if she’d even said anything at all. He didn’t want Trubel to feel like she was stuck between them and he certainly didn’t want the younger Grimm to feel like she didn’t have a home now that he’d moved out of the house. Juliette, despite all of the reasons for their break-up, would never just kick Trubel out.

It was a conversation he thought he better have face-to face rather than over the phone so he took a break for lunch and arranged to meet Trubel at a diner. It was obvious when she walked in that she’d spoken with Juliette and knew about the break-up. In typical Trubel fashion she seemed awkward about the whole thing, not seeming to know what she was supposed to say.

‘I’m sorry about Juliette,’ she offered when she slid into the booth opposite him. ‘Do you think you guys will work it out?’

Nick shook his head. ‘We want different things.’

Trubel nodded, she may not understand exactly what had happened between him and Juliette but she did understand that. ‘I’m thinking of leaving with Josh,’ she informed him.

‘If this is because of me and Juliette, you know you’re always welcome at the house.’

‘No, I know,’ Trubel replied, she’d started fiddling with the salt shaker. ‘I just think I could do some good but Portland’s already got one Grimm.’

Nick understood that feeling, Trubel had come a long way from the scared runaway she’d been when they first met, far enough that he believed her perfectly capable of heading off on her own to find her feet as a Grimm.

‘When are you leaving?’

Trubel shrugged. ‘Maybe after Christmas.’

Trubel had never been one for small talk and Nick didn’t have much he wanted to share so the meal passed quickly and soon he was heading back to work to see if the lab had any results for them and Trubel said she was going to follow up a lead on Monroe and Rosalee’s threats. He told her to be careful even though he doubted she’d give much thought to her own safety when she was worried about that of her friends.

‘And let me know if you find anything.’

Just before they parted ways, Trubel turned and called back to him, ‘Is it because of Adalind?’

‘No,’ he told her honestly. ‘Not really.’

He spent the drive back to work thinking about Trubel leaving and worrying over the trouble she might get herself in when he wasn’t there to help her out. She was a grown woman, though, and more than capable of looking after herself. He’d just have to make sure she knew to check in regularly, something he’d tell Josh as well.

This new case he and Hank had pulled was blissfully wesen free and although it wasn’t an easy one they ran out of leads to follow long before they ran out of daylight – something that didn’t happen too often these days. They spent a couple of hours finishing off paperwork but until they got results from the lab and the ME there wasn’t much more they could do.

There were a lot of things Nick could have done with the early finish but he wasn’t really in the mood to deal with anything Juliette related just yet. It was easier to go back to the loft and think about maybe making something for dinner to apologise for invading what had become Adalind’s space. Just because she said he wasn’t in the way didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of how small the space could feel when you had to share it with someone you weren’t even sure you liked most days.

The rest of the week passed in much the same way. He and Hank worked a couple of wesen free cases and he spent his nights at the loft with Adalind. After the first night he didn’t even bother pretending he was taking the couch. Adalind didn’t seem to have a problem with this new sleeping arrangement and he could admit that sharing a bed with her wasn’t as awkward as he’d imagined it would be.

Two weeks before Christmas he picked up a case involving a couple of wesen and a plot to steal the family fortune. It was such an ordinary case, despite the violence he could attribute to the klaustreich, that he didn’t even need to involve Monroe. He and Hank ended up getting lunch at a strip mall while they discussed the finer points of the case and somehow the conversation rolled around to Christmas shopping.

‘Man, I haven’t even started,’ Hank moaned. ‘I never know what to get my relatives.’

This amused Nick, who heard the same complaint every year. Like every other year, he’d already completed his shopping, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to give Juliette her gift anymore. Was that weird? He hadn’t spoke to her in almost two weeks. She’d tried to call a couple of times and he knew she’d spoken to both Monroe and Rosalee, but he’d been doing his best to avoid her in the hopes that she would understand how serious he was and that he wanted her to have a life free of wesen and Grimms.

‘What did you buy for Trubel?’ Hank wanted to know, likely in the hopes it would inspire his own gift giving.

Nick shrugged. ‘A blank leather bound book so she can start her own version of a Grimm book.’

Hank scowled at him. ‘That’s perfect for her.’

‘I know.’ He chose not to let Hank know it had been Juliette’s idea, it was more fun that way. Besides, it had been on the tail end of another not so subtle hint that he should tell Wu what was really going on (because Wu would love a book like that, Nick knew) and he’d been so wrapped up in avoiding other things that he hadn’t taken the time to explain things to Wu properly.

He wouldn’t get his own book for Christmas and so instead he’d just keep drawing on random sheets of paper as he tried to make sense of all the things he’d witnessed in his continued attempts to explain away those things he’d seen and hold onto the last threads of his sanity.

Hank bounced a few gift ideas off Nick while they ate but it wasn’t until they were finished and talking about something else entirely that it occurred to Nick Hank still didn’t know he and Juliette had broken up. At least if he did he hadn’t said anything. Nick had been so wrapped up in his own avoidance and adjusting to life at the loft that it hadn’t even occurred to him that he should probably tell Hank before his friend accidentally put his foot in it.

The problem was, how did he tell him now when he’d already let two weeks slide by? How did he explain his current living arrangement when Hank inevitably asked? Monroe and Rosalee still didn’t get it and they had all of the facts. Well, most of them, he may have conveniently left out the little bit about he and Adalind sharing the bed but that wasn’t something they really needed to know, that was between him and Adalind.

He’d worry about it later. Their next case didn’t turn out to be nearly as simple. As far as they could tell, someone had delivered a box of pint-sized wesen monsters to a party. The way the witness told it, the attacker had leapt out of a giant present and wreaked havoc on the crowd.

It said a lot about his life that he barely raised a brow at the absurdity of the situation. Something he and Adalind had in common because she seemed more amused than surprised when he was explaining the case to her over dinner.

‘There are a lot of wesen that could do something like that,’ she mused. ‘Not many that would be small enough to fit in that box.’

‘We found a medical ID bracelet at the scene, belongs to a kid.’

Adalind nodded slowly. ‘That narrows it down a bit, not many wesen kids are capable of that kind of destruction without their parents stepping in.’

‘You think it was a kid?’

Adalind shrugged. ‘Just because it’s a kid don’t forget he’s still wesen.’

Nick took that into consideration and so he was more prepared than the others to discover Adalind had been right and that the attackers were actually three kids experiencing the result of hormones, a genetic disorder and general wesen weirdness.

What he wasn’t prepared for was coming face-to-face with Juliette when he and Monroe returned to Monroe’s house to find she and Rosalee had cornered one in the garage. He hadn’t realised Juliette would be there but she’d apparently come there looking for him. Unfortunately (for Juliette), they didn’t really have much time to talk because they still had more kallikantzaroi to deal with and those things were fast.

Rosalee did have time to hiss at him, ‘She thinks you’ve been staying here,’ when Juliette and Monroe were briefly distracted.

That was a conversation he was definitely not about to have with Juliette. It was one thing to tell her he’d bought a loft a few months back as a safe house and that he was staying there now but he absolutely would not be bringing up the fact that Adalind also lived there. He still had some hope that Juliette never need find out he’d cheated on her.

In the end they lured the kallikantzaroi into a fruit cake truck and left their parents to clean up the mess. The paperwork on that one was going to be hell but first he had to get through a really awkward breakfast with Juliette.

All he wanted to do was go home and catch a few hours of sleep but Juliette had been right there alongside them all night trapping the kids and so there really was no way to avoid her polite request for breakfast. For the first time Hank seemed to realise something was going on because he offered to deal with the uniforms when they turned up and waved him on.

He sent Adalind a quick text as they were guided to a table letting her know they’d cured the kids and that he wouldn’t be home until later because Juliette wanted to talk. Her quick reply had him frowning because she’d somehow managed to sound falsely cheerful in a four-word text. The more time he spent with her the more he was learning to read between the lines and this false cheer was definitely covering up something else. The problem was, while he could tell when she was being fake through a text it was really hard to get a read on what she was really feeling.

And also he wasn’t sure why it mattered. He hadn’t needed to text her anyway, she’d been quite clear on the fact that she understood his job would have him in and out at weird hours. He wasn’t even sure why he’d messaged her in the first place. What difference did it really make if she knew he was finished with the case but not directly on his way home?

‘Something wrong?’ Juliette asked, she sounded nervous and awkward, pretty much how he felt right then.

‘It’s nothing.’ They both ordered coffee and then Nick looked down at the menu to avoid having to look at Juliette. There were a lot of feelings stirring inside him now that he was sitting down with her and he didn’t know what to make of them. There was a very large part of him that still loved her, that feeling wasn’t likely to go away anytime soon, but it was dulled now, not just by reality but by the realisation that he could live without her. In the two weeks he’d been avoiding her he hadn’t once felt the urge to pick up the phone and call her, he hadn’t gotten that desire to just tell her about a joke he heard or something weird he’d encountered at work.

Part of that, he knew, was because he’d been telling Adalind those things, more because she was there than anything else (and if he kept telling himself that maybe he’d believe it). He’d also been telling Monroe and Rosalee the things he once might have shared with her. It felt a lot like it had that first year after he became a Grimm when he’d been keeping so much from her and so he’d turned to Monroe. It wasn’t a bad thing at all, he enjoyed sitting down with a beer and talking with Monroe and even Rosalee when she was around.

There was a freedom talking to them – and to Adalind – there wasn’t with Juliette. It was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

Nick nodded. ‘I know.’

‘I think we need to talk about this,’ Juliette insisted. ‘I don’t want to leave things the way we did. I don’t want to believe that it’s over.’

‘It is over, though,’ Nick pointed out quietly, he wasn’t angry or sad he was just pointing out a truth he’d come to terms with. ‘We can never go back to what we were.’

'I'm not ready to let you go,’ Juliette admitted. ‘I’m worried we made a mistake giving up too soon.’

‘Are you going to change your mind about marriage and kids?’ Nick asked, annoyed at her now for the constant back and forth.

She shook her head, eyes brimming with tears. ‘I can’t.’

‘I’m not about to stop being a Grimm.’

‘I know.’ She took a deep breath and plastered on a fake smile for the waitress who came to take their order.

‘I thought you didn’t like the way it takes over my whole life,’ Nick reminded her a little bitterly once the waitress was gone. ‘But that didn’t stop you from helping us last night.’

‘I know,’ Juliette assured him. ‘I still want to help. I don’t want to just turn my back on our friends.’

‘You can’t have it both ways, Juliette,’ Nick said angrily. ‘You can’t just expect me to stop being a Grimm so that my life stops being dangerous and then expect to step in and help out on the wesen related cases.’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t understand what you expect from me,’ he snapped, tired and angry were not a great combination for this kind of conversation.

‘I don’t know either,’ she admitted. ‘I just, I’m not ready to let you go.’

‘Well that’s too bad,’ Nick said fiercely. ‘You lost me the moment you told me our friends getting hurt was my fault.’

‘Nick,’ Juliette protested. ‘You know I didn’t mean that, I was just hurt.’

‘You meant it,’ he told her. ‘You meant every word. We broke up for a reason, Juliette, just because you have regrets doesn’t change the fact that those reasons were valid.’

She narrowed her eyes at him, anger forcing away the tears. ‘How can you so easily throw away all the years we spent together?’

‘You think this is easy?’ he growled. ‘Do you really think it’s been easy knowing for months – yes months! – that what we had wasn’t going to last? I’ve known since Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding that you didn’t want this for us anymore. Months I played along hoping things would get better, that they’d be different and you know what? I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I don’t have to pretend that someday that’ll be us getting married and starting our lives together. You would never have been happy with me Juliette, not really. I can’t give you the normal life you so desperately want.’

He pushed out of the booth and intercepted the waitress as she approached another table. ‘Can I have mine to go please?’

‘Bad break-up?’ she sympathised. ‘Sure thing, hon.’

He didn’t go home, wasn’t in the right mood to just curl up in bed anymore and so he ate his breakfast at his desk, ignoring the look Hank shot him as he finished up his share of the paperwork. Fudging the details just enough to close the case without having to make an arrest took a lot of concentration and it soothed his mind and eased away the anger he was feeling.

Maybe he’d do something nice for Adalind, he wasn’t sure why, but he felt like he needed to apologise for something. Maybe they could go out for a nice dinner and she could distract him from his fight with Juliette with talk about her day. He’d just have to get through a conversation with Hank first.

‘We broke up,’ he announced, pretty much out of the blue.

Hank pushed back from his desk and swung sideways to better look at Nick. ‘What happened?’

Nick shrugged. ‘She wants a normal life.’

‘Man, I’m sorry, that sucks,’ Hank told him. ‘But you know, you’ve been through worse before.’

‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ Nick demanded.

Hank frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Everyone I’ve told just assumes it’s a phase, like we’ll get over it and everything will be good again.’

‘Maybe because you and Juliette have been through some rough spots before?’ Hank suggested.

‘This is different,’ Nick insisted. ‘It’s been a long time coming. She’s never going to marry me, Hank, not so long as I’m a Grimm.’

‘Ah,’ Hank said, understanding filling his expression. ‘Yeah, that’s not something you can change.’

‘Exactly,’ Nick agreed, deliberately ignoring the voice in the back of his head that pointed out that he had given up the chance to no longer be a Grimm. ‘I can’t change what I am and I wouldn’t want to. We couldn’t do our jobs half as well if we didn’t know what we were dealing with.’

‘I get it, man, I do,’ Hank assured him. ‘That’s rough.’

Nick shrugged. ‘I knew it was coming.’

‘That only makes it worse.’

‘Not really.’

‘You want to grab a beer or something? Talk about it?’

Nick shook his head. ‘I’m okay but thanks.’ There was no point in telling Hank he had other plans in mind for his evening, he really didn’t think his friend would approve.

His hopes of a nice dinner were dashed when he returned to the loft. ‘Adalind?’ he called, her car had been in the garage so he knew she was home.

‘In here.’ She didn’t sound good and he followed the sound of her voice to the bathroom. He found her sitting on the cold floor wrapped around the toilet bowl. She was pale and even as he opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, she lurched forward and retched into the bowl.

Trying desperately not to notice the smell, he moved to pull her hair out of the way. She offered him a weak smile in thanks before she retched again. Concerned, he rubbed a hand soothingly up and down her back. He’d thought, because she’d been fine the last few weeks, that she’d gotten over this bug, apparently she hadn’t.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong now?’ he asked her quietly.

Adalind swallowed, and asked, ‘Are you and Juliette really over?’

She retched again before he could respond and he had to wait until she’d relaxed before he could answer. He didn’t understand why she was asking, there seemed to be more important things to worry about at the moment but he answered her all the same. ‘We’re done.’

‘Okay,’ she said weakly, swallowing thickly around the bitter taste in her mouth. ‘I’m pregnant.’

It wasn’t what he was expecting her to say but as soon as she said it he realised he should have seen it sooner. Her sudden aversion to coffee, the change in her moods and the fact that she’d been feeling sick in the mornings all those weeks ago, all of these things should have been a sign but he hadn’t been looking, hadn’t even thought about it.

Just because he should have read the signs didn’t mean the news didn’t throw him. Adalind was pregnant. Adalind was going to have a baby. They were going to have a baby. He didn’t even know what he was supposed to say to that. Building a friendship with her was one thing, even flirting with the what ifs and what could have beens was acceptable, but the idea that she was pregnant with his baby – and he had no doubt it was his – was not something he was prepared for.

‘And here I was planning to ask you out for dinner,’ he joked.

Adalind didn’t find it funny, in fact she actually looked afraid. ‘I didn’t know this would happen,’ she told him. ‘It never even occurred to me with all the other things going on that it could happen. I’m sorry.’

A strange calm washed over him in face of her fear. ‘Don’t be,’ he found himself saying.

‘Nick,’ she whispered sounding unsure. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’

And strangely, he was okay with that.


	11. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second update for the day.

Necessary Sins – Chapter 10

 

He was not okay.

Sitting beside Adalind on the bathroom floor and holding her hair, everything had seemed so simple. Hadn’t he and Juliette broken up because she wasn’t willing to risk children when being a Grimm made his life dangerous? Wasn’t Adalind handing him the very thing he wanted? So he should be happy, right? He should be happy that some part of the future he’d always hoped for was coming to pass.

Only, he’d always thought that future would be with Juliette and all of the what ifs and wondering about how things might have been if he and Adalind had met under different circumstances didn’t automatically mean everything would be okay. They weren’t together, they weren’t prepared for this and they were both still being hunted by the Royal families and a number of other wesen looking for revenge, the keys, more revenge – it wasn’t exactly the ideal time to bring a baby into the world.

He hated that this made him see things from Juliette’s perspective, he hated that he understood where she was coming from now that he was faced with the fears of keeping a child safe in his world. He hated that suddenly he was doubting his decision to break up with her, wondering if they could have made it work anyway.

He hated that he was even entertaining those thoughts when there was another part of him that was genuinely pleased with what had happened. Adalind wasn’t exactly the first person he’d choose to have a child with but these days she wasn’t the last either. They’d managed to build a friendship in just a short few months even after years of hating each other and fighting for the upper hand. If their constant battle of wills was anything to go by (and how they’d turned that around) then there was no reason they shouldn’t be able to work together to raise a child. They could be one of those co-parenting teams, right?

He wasn’t sure it was possible, but he got the feeling he’d been thinking so loud it had woken Adalind because she rolled over and squinted at him through the pale sunlight that was managing to streak through the dirty exterior of the windows. ‘You’re up early.’

He made some sort of grunt in response that didn’t really do anything more than cause her to frown at him with sudden suspicion. He thought about lying to her, about pushing it off as something to do with work but in the years he’d known Adalind he’d rarely lied to her. Tricked and deceived, sure, but that was just par for the course when he was trying to outsmart her in whatever game they were playing. He’d never outright lied to her, though, not that he could remember, and he certainly hadn’t since they’d started becoming friends. Which was a weird enough realisation to have all on its own.

Whatever happened now, they would always be tied together by their child. Whether or not she moved out or he did, whether or not they met other people, this baby would always keep them together and the thought was calming, it put things in perspective and so instead of brushing off the tumult of thoughts churning inside him, he shared them with her.

‘I’ve become very aware of the number of people who want us dead.’

‘Ah,’ Adalind said, understanding dawning. ‘I’ve already had this freak out.’

Nick turned to look at her. ‘What?’

Adalind nodded. ‘When I first realised I was pregnant I panicked about all of the things that could go wrong, all of the people who want to kill me, all of the people I’ve wronged or who just want answers from me. It doesn’t exactly seem like the best time to bring another child into the world when I couldn’t even keep Diana.’

‘What changed your mind?’ He rolled onto his side now so that he was mirroring her position.

‘You did,’ she told him. ‘I thought about terminating but that lasted about two seconds and I thought about just running away – that thought lasted about as long – but you were here. I don’t know what this is between us, whether you can call it a friendship or something else, but whatever it is its ours and this child is too. Yes, the timing isn’t exactly ideal, but you’re a Grimm and I’m a hexenbiest and we can be pretty scary on our own but together? Nick, I think you and I could take on the world.’

Nick stared at her for a long moment, mulling over her words and realising he’d needed to hear them. They were the things he wanted to hear because he did want this baby and it didn’t matter that it had happened during a spell or that it was on the heels of his break up with Juliette because Adalind was right, they could do this.

‘I kind of want to kiss you right now.’

Adalind grinned. ‘That’s the relief talking.’

‘You’re probably right,’ the response was automatic, the deflection rolled off his tongue without thought but after he’d said them he wondered if they were true. It wasn’t something he was prepared to think about just then, they had way bigger things to deal with than his (not so) fleeting desire to kiss her. He smiled ruefully at her. ‘Thanks.’

She shrugged again, pushing herself up and making general motions that as they were awake she might as well get started on the day. ‘Happy to help. I assure you, at some point, you’ll have to remind me of all of that.’

He laughed.

‘Oh, I’m perfectly serious. Do you realise how hard it’s been keeping this from you? I’m like an emotional yo-yo, one minute everything is fine and I’m excited to be a mom again and the next I’m paranoid and seeing wesen assassins around every corner.’

Nick stopped laughing abruptly. He sat up sharply and reached for her hand, gripping it tightly in his own. ‘I didn’t need that thought.’ Then after a moment of further (terrified) consideration (he didn’t know if he was feeling that for Adalind or the baby or both) he asked, ‘Have there been more wesen assassins?’

‘Ha!’ she cried, apparently amused by his own yo-yo of emotion. ‘Now you know how I feel.’ But she squeezed his hand reassuringly before she pulled free. ‘Let’s go out for breakfast since we didn’t get to do dinner last night.’

‘Why do I feel like that invitation has less to do with my company and more to do with the contents of our fridge?’

Adalind grinned. ‘Because neither of us have been to the store and you’re actually kind of smart no matter what people say.’

He thought he might have just been insulted but he let it slide. Much like he ignored the niggling concern in the back of his mind all weekend that he and Adalind were very much an old married couple for two people who weren’t even together.

It started at breakfast. They went to a café they’d started frequenting when they were carpooling and despite the chill in the air, the sun was warm and so they took a table outside (though still close to the patio heater). Adalind liked to people watch and he had to admit it was a fun way to pass the time with her because it pitted his observational skills as a detective against her general knowledge of people. After all, you had to be able to read people to manipulate them affectively.

‘No,’ she told him with a laugh. ‘That’s definitely a walk of shame. No woman would ever wear those shoes and that dress at this time of day.’

Nick shook his head. ‘That’s a wedding ring she’s wearing,’ he pointed out. ‘Girls night, she’s crawling home with a hangover hoping like hell her husband’s already sorted the kids out.’

‘What makes you think she has kids?’

‘She’s what? Thirty-five? She’s unsteady in those heels and it has nothing to do with being hungover. I’m telling you, she’s used to running around after kids and wearing sneakers.’

Adalind scoffed but as neither of them were about to go up and ask the woman they left it at that. After they’d swapped their attention to talking about Monroe and Rosalee’s latest threat (a fox killed and left to hang outside the Spice Shop’s back door), the waitress Tamsin (who was familiar enough with their orders that she brought them a coffee and tea without having to ask), stopped by to get their breakfast order. The café was a little quiet given the early hour on a Saturday and so Adalind relished the chance to talk with someone outside of her work.

Nick learned more in two minutes listening to Adalind and Tamsin talk than he ever really needed to know about the woman’s life. That didn’t mean he didn’t express his own best wishes when she nervously explained how she was soon going to have to defend her dissertation, it was just weird realising again how perfectly normal Adalind was when he wasn’t seeing only the vicious hexenbiest attempting to kill him.

He figured that went both ways. If he was seeing Adalind in a whole new light he could only imagine she was seeing the same in him – well he hoped she was. He knew how hard it was for wesen to believe he wasn’t like other Grimms, that he didn’t have a shoot first ask questions later policy. Or a kill first, bury the body later philosophy as most wesen expected of him. He liked to think that this whole thing was just as weird and disconcerting for her as well.

It was just that she’d been brave enough to reach out to her enemy when things got bad. It took a lot of strength and determination to take that kind of risk, to place your life in the hands of someone you’d tried to kill and only recently tricked into losing their powers. That was Adalind, though. He had to respect that, respect her, he didn’t know if he’d have been able to make that choice had the situation been reversed.

He was glad she’d made that choice though; he was finding that being friends with Adalind was actually kind of enjoyable. He liked the woman she was without all the vengeance and death threats. He hoped she liked the man she saw now that he was no longer trying to kill her. He wondered if he should invite Rosalee and Monroe over so they could get to know her as he had done. She was going to be a huge part of his life now and he thought it might be a good idea to start rebuilding the trust they had broken when they stole Diana from her if he was ever going to be able to help the two parts of his life become one.

He thought he’d leave the whole pregnancy thing out of it for now. He just didn’t think that would give the right impression. He didn’t want anyone making assumptions about his reasons for spending time with Adalind. He wanted his friends to see the Adalind he now knew, not the vindictive witch they’d last dealt with.

And he wasn’t going to analyse the why of that just yet.

Besides, wasn’t there a specific number of months you were supposed to wait before you told people you were expecting a baby? He’d have to ask Adalind, he really knew nothing about babies. He probably should start correcting that soon. He figured he’d need the next six (or was it five now?) months to learn all he could.

After breakfast Adalind dragged him through six different furniture stores looking for a small table she wanted to put beside the elevator, ‘You know, for keys and things.’

Shopping for furniture while battling Christmas crowds was not particularly pleasant but he couldn’t exactly judge Adalind for wanting to make the loft homier. They hadn’t really talked about their living arrangements, just sort of fallen into living together without any real fuss. Sharing one bathroom had been a bit of a struggle those first few days but now they were used to it. Whether or not they’d intended it to happen, the loft was theirs more so than it had ever just been Nick’s safe house or Adalind’s refuge and so he didn’t begrudge her the table or the stools she decided would be perfect at the bench in the open kitchen.

He drew the line at the rug, though, which she considered fair when he pointed out they had no way of getting it home and they weren’t about to have it delivered and compromise the loft’s location.

‘I think there’s a smaller one in storage with my mother’s things,’ she’d said thoughtfully which was how they went from furniture shopping on Saturday to clearing out her storage locker on Sunday.

‘Do you think we should move some of this stuff to the trailer?’ he asked, looking around at some of the creepier items she had stored away. He picked up what looked like an honest-to-God witch’s hat and raised a brow in amusement.

Adalind eyed the hat warily. ‘I used that when I changed myself into Juliette. I think this stuff is too powerful to leave in a trailer in the woods – no offense.’

Nick wasn’t offended, the stuff he had in his trailer was too valuable to leave lying about unprotected. He wasn’t entirely sure the piece of land in the woods was any better than the storage yard had been. He was relying on people not knowing where to look to keep it safe. He didn’t have any security on it or any way of preventing people from breaking in and taking things. Something he should probably rectify now that Adalind had made him aware of it.

‘Most of this can probably go,’ Adalind admitted. ‘The hexenbiest stuff we can take back to the loft, it’s only really a couple of boxes and they’re not the kind of things we should just leave lying around.’

What she wanted to keep fitted into six boxes and they easily fit into the back of Nick’s Land Cruiser. The rug took some negotiating but it wasn’t nearly as big as the one she’d been eyeing in the store and eventually they managed to get it in on top of the boxes and balanced over the top of the backseats and through to the front.

They hit the grocery store on the way home, conceding that they couldn’t keep eating all of their meals out.

The whole weekend passed in a blur and it wasn’t really until Monday when he was back at work that it occurred to him how, to an outsider, he and Adalind looked (and frankly acted) like a couple.

They’d argued over furniture (and, at one point, paint colours), they’d written a grocery list and planned the week’s meals and they’d talked about her work and his, about Monroe and Rosalee’s continuing problems with the wesenrein and sat around the loft in comfortable silence in the evenings, Adalind catching up on some work and Nick reading through a few books he’d taken from the trailer that he hoped would shed some more light on the wesenrein.

Honestly, he felt a bit sick.

Hank noticed his sudden turn in behaviour but attributed his sullen mood to the break up with Juliette. He once again offered to go for drinks but Nick wasn’t sure he knew what to say to his partner. It wasn’t like he could explain that Juliette had been the furthest thing from his mind all day because it was so consumed with Adalind. He sincerely doubted it would go down well.

He didn’t much think it would go down well with Monroe either but he desperately needed to talk about it and he could rely on Monroe to listen without judging him too harshly. He fully expected some judgement. He didn’t even know how he’d wound up where he was. Seriously, how had this even happened? How had he gone from hating Adalind and wanting her dead to caring enough about her that the idea of her getting jumped and killed by one of those wesen assassins she’d joked about made his chest hurt and his stomach twist into knots?

He wished he could blame the baby. He really did but he’d been very honest with himself lately, that was how the whole Juliette break-up had come about, and so he couldn’t lie now and pretend the baby was his sole reason. He hadn’t even known about it until long after he and Adalind had formed this friendship thing.

Christ, did he have feelings for Adalind? Not just the feelings he’d already come to terms with but feelings.

‘Dude,’ Monroe muttered, one-part disgust, two-parts horrified fascination, ‘I kind of think you do.’

Nick let his head hit the sticky bar, regretted it immediately, but couldn’t help feeling the action was warranted. ‘How did this happen?’ he moaned. ‘I’m supposed to hate her! We’re supposed to hate each other not fall into a relationship without even noticing. How does that happen?’

As horrified as he was by the idea of Nick and Adalind as anything more than enemies, the whole thing seemed to amuse Monroe. At least that was the impression Nick got when he lifted his head from the bar and his friend said, ‘Hey, you’re the one that slept with her.’

‘Out of necessity!’ Nick protested, though his words lacked the conviction they’d once had. ‘She stole my powers! What else was I supposed to do?’

Monroe shrugged. ‘I don’t know man. I mean, I want to give you advice but I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to be encouraging you or consoling you.’

Nick shot him a dirty look which lacked any real heat because he didn’t know either. Did he want to be in a relationship with Adalind? Sure he’d thought about what it would be like to kiss her and he’d spent a good month or so with images of their morning together on a constant loop in his head (now he at least got a break between fantasies) but he was a guy and she was an incredibly attractive woman, it was only natural. Fantasising about sleeping with her again was one thing, actually being in a relationship, developing feelings for her, was another thing entirely.

‘But what about Juliette?’ Nick wondered.

Monroe hesitated, like he wasn’t entirely sure he should say what he was thinking but went ahead and said it anyway. ‘Is it possible the reason you and Juliette couldn’t work passed your issues is because of your feelings for Adalind?’

That was a truly horrific thought, one he’d once dismissed but couldn’t ignore any longer, and it stayed with him on the drive home. Was what Monroe had said true? Had his whatever-the-hell-it-was with Adalind coloured his relationship with Juliette? Had it pushed him to break things off by showing him the things he hadn’t been willing to see? Had spending so much time with Adalind really changed the way he saw things so much that he’d broken things of with Juliette because he wanted Adalind instead?

He supposed, in a way, he had. If it weren’t for Adalind, he wouldn’t have realised how much he liked being able to tell someone about his day without the fear that something he said would push her away. With Juliette there’d always been that underlying worry that one day he would say something about his Grimm work that would push her too far. There was that fear that he would roll with one of the blows life hit him with when he probably shouldn’t.

Isn’t that kind of what he’d already done with Adalind though?

He’d brushed aside her tricking him into bed because it was just how things as a Grimm worked. He did something, Adalind reacted, or she did something to which he reacted to which she reacted that had him reacting which led to her taking away his powers and then him sleeping with her to get them back.

And he just accepted it, dealt with it and moved on. This time that attitude had (maybe) worked out for the best but it hadn’t always. If he really thought about it, a lot of the things that went wrong in his life could be attributed to his and Adalind’s constant struggle to defeat the other.

Which was another terrifying thought. How the hell had Adalind become such a significant part of his life without him realising it? It wasn’t just now when they were living together and soon to have a baby but back when they’d been enemies too. Their friends and family just sort of got caught in the middle of this huge destructive loop.

And wow was that unhealthy. And while it didn’t exactly reflect well on him that he’d let it happen, the worst thing that came with realising it was that once again he had to concede that Juliette might have a point. He’d brushed it off and been offended when she’d blamed him for all of the things that went wrong but he was starting to see that while it hadn’t been intentional on his part he certainly had played a significant role in getting his friends hurt.

If he’d been honest with Hank sooner his partner would never have eaten the love cookies Adalind made, he’d never have been at risk from Adalind because he’d have known what he was dealing with. He still hadn’t told Wu and look how that was turning out for him. Juliette’s coma and memory loss had been a direct strike designed to hurt him and Monroe had certainly caught his share of flak for being friends with a Grimm.

About the only one who wasn’t worse off for knowing him was Trubel and that was really only because he’d had answers she desperately needed to make sense of the world she was seeing. She also had the unique position of being completely free of Adalind’s worse actions, she’d never been victim to one of Adalind’s plans, never been caught between their fight.

He wondered if that was what made it easier for her to view Adalind as a friend. If because she’d never been hurt by Adalind she more easily accepted her and her role in his life now? Not that she knew the true extent of his relationship with Adalind or that he’d moved right in with her after his break up with Juliette.

Or would she still be hurt on Juliette’s behalf when everything inevitably came out? Because sooner or later Nick was going to have a child and none of his friends were stupid, they’d be able to do the math and draw two conclusions. Either he’d cheated on Juliette with Adalind or Adalind had somehow duped him into believing the child was his. Which would inevitably drive them right back to the realisation that for him to even believe the child could be his then there’d have to have been sex involved at some point.

He didn’t like the idea of Juliette finding out that way, of hurting her again when he’d already caused her so much pain but he didn’t know how else he was supposed to tell her about it. He wasn’t even sure he had to. He kind of just assumed that now they weren’t together she would slowly but surely pull away from all things wesen. Because as much as she cared for Monroe and Rosalee any association she had with them would only increase her risk again of being in the same danger she’d accused Nick of bringing into her life. How could she have that shiny safe future she wanted if she stuck around wesen?

Was it lying to her when he never planned on her being a part of his Grimm life again? That thing with the kids had only happened because she’d been at Monroe’s looking for him. When she no longer had a reason to seek him out then she wouldn’t have a reason to see Adalind and their child or even him.

It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, realising that he hoped he never had to see Juliette again but as selfish as it felt for many reasons it was also best for her. It served the purpose of keeping her free of the Grimm and wesen influences she wanted kept far away from her normal future and it prevented him from having to have a painful conversation about his dalliance with Adalind.

As much as he wanted it to be true, he didn’t think Juliette would believe he hadn’t known it was Adalind at the time when he was living with her now and apparently had developed feelings for her. Not that he would ever be telling Juliette that. He thought, if it ever came up (which he would do everything in his power to make sure it didn’t), he’d just leave it at awkward co-parenting and not bring any feelings that may have developed along the way into it.

It was bad enough he’d told Monroe. Or maybe Monroe had told him?

Adalind looked up from her laptop when he stepped out of the elevator and smiled. ‘Hey, how was Monroe?’

The question hit him with more force than such a simple one really should have because, holy fuck he’d actually texted her to let her know he was going to be late because he was having a beer with Monroe. What happened to not needing to know where he was? Hadn’t she said that a couple of days after he’d moved in? That she wasn’t his girlfriend and so she’d never ask him when he’d be home? Yet, rather than wait for her to ask he’d started letting her know and she’d done the same in kind. Whenever she had a work meeting or she was staying late to help out a student or her boss she texted him to let him know.

How had he not realised they were doing this sooner? How had the fact that he felt the need to let her know where he was and when he’d be home not driven home the realisation that they acted like a couple earlier?

Rather than answer her, he walked right up to her, took her face in his hands, bent down and kissed her. There was one nerve-wracking moment where she froze and he worried he’d made a mistake but then her lips moved and she was matching his kiss with a soft urgency of her own. And man, if he’d known she could kiss like that he probably wouldn’t have waited so long to do it again.

Had he known she could kiss like that? He was sure it hadn’t been like that when they’d been trying to get his powers back. Not that he could blame her, it hadn’t exactly been a comfortable experience, at least not at first.

Eventually the need to breath had him breaking away from her. His breathing was ragged and he could only stare at her. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes slightly glazed but she was looking at him with such surprise and something that was definitely lust that he kind of wanted to kiss her again.

‘What -’ Adalind paused to swallow and tried again. ‘What was that for?’

‘Did you know we’ve basically been in a relationship for months?’ he asked in response.

‘What?’ Adalind scrunched up her nose and gave him a look that suggested he should have his head examined. ‘No we haven’t, don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I just had a whole frightening conversation with Monroe about it.’

Adalind shook her head dismissively. ‘I think I’d have known if we were.’

‘Yeah,’ Nick laughed, though it wasn’t a particularly unhappy laugh, he thought it had a suspiciously hysterical edge to it. ‘I thought so too.’

‘Nick, come on,’ she rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not like we,’ she broke off with a frown and then began again with, ‘I mean…’ she trailed off into silence.

He saw it, the exact moment she caught on to what he was saying. The moment she re-evaluated all of their actions over the last months and not just the weeks since he’d moved in, and realised that actually, despite what they’d been telling themselves, they really had been acting all couple-y. She looked vaguely horrified.

‘That’s,’ she sputtered, shook her head and tried again, ‘God, how did that even happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nick answered honestly. ‘I only just realised it today at work.’

‘Is that why you had a drink with Monroe?’

He nodded, pulling out the chair at the end of the table so he could slump into it. ‘I needed another perspective.’

‘And what did he say?’ Adalind seemed strangely reluctant to hear his answer, like she was preparing for some bad news. He wasn’t sure how anything he said beyond this point could be worse than realising they’d been acting out the steps of a relationship they hadn’t even realised they were in.

Though did it really count as a relationship if you didn’t know you were in it? Or could you just write the whole thing off as the general weirdness of their situation? It wasn’t like they’d been having sex, that had to count for something, right?

‘That I might have feelings for you.’

Clearly those words were not the ones she was expecting but that didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy hearing them. He could quite clearly see how she switched from dreading his words to elating in them. There was also some amusement there as well but he wasn’t sure whether that was aimed at him or the situation.

‘He thinks you might have feelings for me?’

And that was definitely amusement in her tone.

‘It’s a theory,’ he admitted uncomfortably.

‘One that is clearly based on something,’ she pointed out. ‘What have you been telling him?’

‘Look,’ Nick growled a little frustrated by her continued amusement. ‘I don’t know, okay? We were talking about all the little things you and I do and he said we were acting just like he and Rosalee do sometimes. It just kind of spiralled from there, okay? One minute we were talking about how you do that smile thing when you know you’ve impressed me but you’re being modest and the next thing I know we were discussing if maybe my feelings for you were part of the reason I don’t want to work things out with Juliette.’

He could tell as soon as he said it that she’d never in a million years have expected those words to come out of his mouth. He couldn’t say he’d expected to ever think them, let alone acknowledge them out loud but he had. He’d said them and the words were having a strange effect on Adalind. She stopped smiling and for one horrible moment he thought he’d hurt her but when she spoke her words were soft and he realised he’d actually said something right.

‘I think I might have feelings for you too.’

‘Oh.’ Nick cleared his throat. ‘Ah.’ His eyes darted away and then back again. ‘Really?’

And the amusement was back. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t?’

‘Uh,’ Nick really didn’t know what to say. He’d been thinking himself in circles on the drive home, considering everything he and Monroe had talked about, everything he and Juliette had discussed but he could admit it hadn’t once crossed his mind to wonder (or worry) about how Adalind felt. Until he’d come home and seen her he hadn’t really known what he wanted to do about his own feelings let alone hers. Honestly, he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about it.

As if she’d come to a decision, Adalind got to her feet and held out a hand to him. ‘Nick?’

‘Yeah?’ he asked, looking up at her, his voice huskier than ever.

‘We’re going to have sex now.’

‘What?’

She laughed and the sound sent a pleasant hum right down south. He reached out and took her hand and didn’t protest when she led him back to their bedroom.


	12. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The domestic side of Nick and Adalind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for the kudos!

Both he and Adalind had developed what could be considered (by some people) as an unnatural wariness of grocery store parking lots. That being said, after the fourth broken carton of eggs Adalind had declared that if they were jumped by wesen one more time she was going to start shopping online and having their food delivered to the Spice Shop.

Nick had conveniently failed to mention the three times he’d been attacked when she wasn’t with him and he was pretty sure she’d been attacked at least twice on her own – he could only assume they hadn’t needed eggs either of those two times and that she’d easily handled whatever (whoever) had attacked her.

Still, they’d changed grocery stores four times since he’d purchased the loft and she’d moved in and it amused him how much having to change stores got on Adalind’s nerves. When he’d asked her about it (after the third time) she’d explained how she never knew where anything was because they kept having to move. He’d given her one of those bemused smiles he seemed to reserve solely for her and hadn’t asked again.

They did try to schedule trips to the grocery store when they could both go, working under the assumption that the two of them fighting together stood a better chance against any wesen attempting to attack, kill or kidnap them from the parking lot.

Which was exactly how Nick ended up pushing the cart down aisles late on a Wednesday night when he’d have much rather been doing other things. Like sleeping. Okay, “sleeping” with Adalind would probably have been more accurate but it would not have involved clothes, weapons and arguments over whether or not his choice of breakfast cereal (for the mornings when he was in a hurry) was at all healthy (she won that argument). Though looking down at what was already in their cart he couldn’t help thinking she might have been right to veto his sugary choice.

They were two very busy people who weren’t especially good at cooking (one of whom had developed an unnatural craving for Oreos and liquorice – at the same time) and so there was a lot of pasta and snacks but not so much of the meat and vegetable variety. It didn’t help that Adalind (when she wasn’t poisoning people) baked really nice cookies. It was probably a good thing he spent so much time running around after criminals and wesen and criminal wesen, he’d probably eaten more baked goods since befriending Adalind than he’d eaten since he was a teenager.

‘We really need to learn to cook more,’ Nick observed, watching Adalind hesitate before dropping another box of Oreos into the cart.

‘We cook,’ Adalind defended. ‘We cook the same ten things,’ she admitted, ‘but we still cook.’

Nick grinned. ‘I think it’s eleven now,’ he corrected. ‘That vegetable bake thing you made was actually nice.’

Adalind frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t like that?’

‘No, you said you didn’t like it but I also think you were eating everything with peanut butter that week – and how did I not realise you were pregnant sooner?’

This time it was Adalind who gave him a grin. ‘I hid it very well.’

‘Possible,’ Nick agreed. ‘It’s also possible I didn’t want to know.’

‘True,’ Adalind conceded. ‘But I don’t think either of us were really expecting it.’

They walked a little further around the store, idly picking up items before either dropping them in the cart or placing them back on the shelf. Or dropping them in the cart and having them placed back on the shelf – Adalind tended to abuse her powers of veto especially when he couldn’t argue because if he let her buy whatever random food stuff took her fancy then he didn’t have to get it on the way home from work when she declared she absolutely had to have it.

‘Were your cravings this bad with Diana?’ he found himself asking.

‘Not really,’ Adalind responded without bothering to look at him. ‘I had a few odd cravings to start but mostly my whole pregnancy then was weird, I had to drink a lot of nasty things and do some that were even worse to complete the ritual to get my powers back.’

‘Was it worth it?’

This time Adalind did look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t feel like me without my powers but what it did to Diana?’ She made a sound that he thought might have been a sigh but also could have been disgust at her own actions. ‘She’s never going to have a normal life, not like this one.’

Adalind placed her hand over her stomach and rubbed gently, as though trying to impress on this child how much she was not going to let that happen. Nick placed his own hand next to Adalind’s and stroked his thumb up and down. It was nice, being able to touch her like this, touch the place where their child grew without feeling like he was overstepping. Since Monroe had helped him see the truth of his relationship with Adalind there’d been a lot more than just some innocent belly stroking.

‘I’m a Grimm and you’re a hexenbiest,’ Nick reminded her quietly. ‘This kid is never going to have a normal life, not by other people’s standards but our kid’s going to have our idea of normal and that’s so much more important.’

‘Sometimes,’ Adalind laughed, ‘you’re such a romantic goof.’ But she stretched up on her toes to kiss him quickly to let him know she understood what he was saying.

‘Romantic goof?’

‘Yes,’ Adalind confirmed. ‘But it’s okay because you’re my romantic goof.’

Adalind always seemed surprised whenever she talked about them as, well, as a them. Whenever she referred to their new status she always seemed to be a little confused about how it had come about and more than a little shocked it had come about at all. He couldn’t blame her, he found it just as difficult to believe. They might have only been labelling what this was for a couple of weeks but Monroe had been right to point out they’d been acting as a couple for much longer. He was pretty sure Trubel, would agree with that assessment. If she’d still been around.

She’d waited until after Christmas just as she said she would but she was gone before New Year’s, claiming she wanted to start the new year in a new place. She wanted a fresh start and Josh wanted to reclaim his home, something Nick could understand. He made sure to stop by the house before she left and although he hadn’t done it intentionally, he’d managed to time his trip so he didn’t have to see Juliette. He hadn’t spoken to her since the uncomfortable breakfast he’d walked out on and given the other things going on in his life he thought that might (definitely) be for the best.

So he’d swung by on the way to work and said goodbye to both Trubel and Josh and made sure they both knew to check in regularly or to call if they needed anything.

‘I still think I’m supposed to be offended,’ Nick muttered.

Adalind just shrugged and started walking down the aisle. In the next aisle he watched her drop a pack of baby wipes into the cart (he took that to mean the pack in his glove box was empty) and it made him think on something he’d been considering since she’d told him she was pregnant.

‘Do you think we should start putting money away for the baby?’ he asked. ‘Like some of my pay every week?’

Amused, Adalind glanced at him. ‘Thinking about college already?’

‘Well now I am,’ Nick grumbled. ‘No, I just meant that there’s a lot we need to buy, maybe we should start setting some money aside.’

‘Oh, I’ve actually been thinking about that too.’

It didn’t surprise him she’d been thinking about it. When she’d first moved into the loft she’d relied a lot on what he could get for her or the money he’d lent her because she had no access to her own and no income. He’d never asked her to pay rent on the loft, even after she’d started making money of her own but he knew she’d been putting some away (originally) to pay him back. The more he’d gotten to know her the less he’d actually cared. She’d bought a lot of the furniture for the loft and now that he was living there too and they were together it just didn’t seem necessary.

As far as he knew, she wasn’t so worried about finances now that she was helping pay bills and buy food. It probably helped that she’d saved up and sold items to buy her car on her own. That piece of independence probably went a long way. He’d never ask her to pay rent, not now, but somehow they’d struck a balance with the other expenses that she felt like she was contributing and he didn’t feel like he was constantly giving her too much and making her feel obligated in some way.

He hated thinking about money in terms of their relationship. They weren’t there yet, they’d just fallen into a weirdly comfortable relationship, much like they had living together and he didn’t even feel the need to ask about those things. Everything about them was moving so quickly, it was easier to just let it run its course and deal with problems along the way. As long as he didn’t think too hard about it, it was easy.

‘You have?’

‘We don’t really use much of my pay,’ she reasoned. ‘I’m paying for more now but most of the bigger things still come out of yours, I was thinking maybe we should start putting aside some of my pay for the future.’

Nick didn’t think that was strictly true, he’d never felt like he was contributing more to their expenses than Adalind (well not now) but if that was how she felt then he was okay with letting her put her own pay aside for their baby.

‘We can do that,’ Nick agreed. ‘Have you thought about how much?’

Adalind shook her head and they turned down the next aisle. ‘We probably need to sit down and go through our expenses to see how much we can put aside.’

Nick nodded to show he thought it was a good idea and changed the subject again because something he’d just spotted on the shelf had reminded him of a comment Wu had made earlier at a crime scene – never mind that it was flour and the connection was beyond tenuous.

‘Wu made a weird comment earlier,’ Nick told her. ‘This new case Hank and I caught looks like it involves a dispute between a couple of eisbeber so we brought Bud in to help us out and I guess Wu’s been paying a lot of attention to things lately because he recognised Bud and started making all sorts of observations about previous cases.’

‘You know you have to tell him the truth.’ Adalind wasn’t particularly sympathetic to his plight, likely because she’d been telling him this since before he’d moved into the loft – and she definitely wasn’t the only one. The fact that even Renard was starting to put pressure on Nick to deal with Wu really said something about how long he’d let this go.

‘I know,’ Nick grumbled. ‘It was just easier with Hank, the wesen on that case was a man he’d known for years – and his goddaughter – he was a lot more open to explanations.’

‘You’re just making excuses.’ Adalind dropped a few more items into their cart and then they turned the corner and they were in the produce section looking at all of the things they never bought enough of. ‘Don’t keep putting it off because you feel guilty for making him think he was crazy. In the end, he’ll be grateful for the truth.’

Nick knew what she was saying was true but that didn’t mean it was easy. With Hank, telling him the truth had been a spur of the moment decision right in the thick of things. It hadn’t been an easy explanation to make but the situation had forced Hank to accept it quickly and worry about the details later. Wu had been worrying over nothing but the details since their encounter with the aswang. He was going to need more than a quick “everything you’re seeing is real” speech.

‘You get the fruit,’ Adalind instructed. ‘I’ll get the veggies and we’ll meet over by the butcher.’

‘Right.’ Two minutes later, they met back up and Adalind placed a variety of different vegetables in the cart alongside his bananas, apples and a punnet of strawberries he had plans for later. ‘Feeling adventurous?’

‘At least if we just steam them or throw them in a stir fry we’ll be eating more. We’re going to set a horrible example for our child if we don’t start eating better.’

‘We eat fine,’ Nick shrugged. ‘But I see your point.’

‘If we learn to cook all this stuff now, then when he or she is big enough to actually eat this stuff we might have gotten good enough we won’t accidentally poison our own child.’

Nick scoffed. ‘We’ve never once poisoned ourselves.’ Adalind raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh that was just morning sickness,’ he dismissed. ‘Most of the stuff we’ve been making has actually turned out pretty well.’

Adalind rolled her eyes but he had a point and they both knew it. They might never have really learned to cook (Juliette had done most of the cooking when they were together because she had the regular hours to take the time to do so) but they were making do with the things they did know how to make and he thought they were doing okay experimenting with new things.

In more ways than one.

Adalind narrowed her eyes at him. ‘How are you thinking about sex now?’

He shrugged. ‘The mind wanders, I can’t help it if it just naturally wanders in a direction in which you’re naked. Especially,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘now that I can do something about it.’

Adalind seemed amused by his words but before she could comment on them his phone rang. With a sigh he fished it out of his pocket and saw that it was Wu. Seemed like any plans he had for post-grocery nakedness were going to have to wait.

At least Adalind seemed as disappointed by this turn of events as he did. He told Wu he’d need thirty minutes and then turned the cart toward the checkout. At least they didn’t get jumped in the parking lot by any wesen, he didn’t particularly feel like having to switch stores again and he was pretty sure turning up late to meet with Wu covered in blood, bruises or whatever other scrapes that resulted from another confrontation with wesen would not have sold the sergeant on how normal things were.

At home (and was it weird that he could think of the loft as home when not long ago the house he’d shared with Juliette had been the only home he could think of?) he helped Adalind put the bags in the elevator and then left her to unpack while he switched cars and went out to meet Wu and Hank.

Another eisbeber was dead, and this one had no connection they could find to their previous victim which seemed to rule out their initial theory of a dispute being the motive. This victim had been killed in the same way as the first victim (strangled with what turned out to be a skipping rope) but aside from being someone Bud knew (“from around”) they didn’t have anything to connect him to the first victim.

‘Unless someone is just killing off random eisbeber,’ Monroe pointed out when he stopped by the Spice Shop the next day to fill he and Rosalee in.

‘Hank and I are working on that angle,’ Nick admitted. ‘We’ve got Wu trying to find another connection.’

‘Have you thought about what you’re going to tell Wu?’ Rosalee asked.

‘I’m working on it,’ Nick responded shortly.

Rosalee seemed taken aback by his response. ‘You know you need to tell him.’

‘Yeah, I know, Adalind keeps reminding me.’

Monroe and Rosalee exchanged a look and then suddenly Rosalee had something she needed to do in the main room of the shop and he and Monroe were alone in the side room. Nick raised his brows expectantly.

‘So, uh, how are things with you and Adalind?’ Monroe asked awkwardly.

Amused because he assumed Rosalee had put him up to this, Nick replied, ‘Things are good.’

‘Good,’ Monroe said. ‘That’s good.’ He nodded his head and looked around the room so he wouldn’t have to look at Nick.

They stood in silence, Nick trying to wait Monroe out but eventually he had to ask, ‘Something else?’

‘No,’ Monroe didn’t at all sound convincing. ‘Well, it’s just, last time we talked about it you thought you might have feelings for her and that you’d been acting like an old married couple.’

‘Yes.’ Nick was getting a kick out of making his friend actually say the words. He needed to get back to work because he thought Wu was starting to take note of his comings and goings but he would happily draw Wu’s growing suspicions if it meant he had to wait for Monroe to spit the words out. Especially because he knew Rosalee was listening intently from the other room.

‘Just, ah, just wondering,’ Monroe tried to say. ‘Just,’ he trailed off and Nick heard an exasperated sound from the next room. Monroe heard it too and winced. ‘What’s going on with you and Adalind?’

‘Feel better?’ Nick grinned and Monroe shot him a glare. In answer to Monroe’s question, Nick thought about shrugging, about playing it off as nothing much to talk about but that would be a lie. His relationship with Adalind wasn’t something to be shrugged off or covered up, it wasn’t something he should be ashamed of and trying to hide.

He liked Adalind, he could see a future with her he hadn’t been able to see with Juliette, not since he’d become a Grimm anyway and Adalind deserved more from him than shame and half-truths. He wasn’t ashamed of his relationship with Adalind, he didn’t feel guilty for being with her and Monroe and Rosalee needed to know that if he was ever going to be able to have all the people he cared about in the same room at the same time and not trying to kill each other.

‘It’s pretty much like it was before only now there’s sex involved,’ he answered honestly.

‘Oh,’ Monroe nodded. ‘That’s good.’

‘Actually, really says a lot about how much of a couple we were before that having sex hasn’t really changed things much,’ Nick mused. ‘I mean we were basically going on dates already.’

This seemed to draw Rosalee in from the other room and she didn’t even pretend she hadn’t been eavesdropping when she asked, ‘You were already going on dates?’

‘Pretty much,’ Nick shrugged again. ‘I mean we were having dinner and coffee and hanging out.’

‘While you were with Juliette,’ Rosalee observed. She didn’t seem angry about it, more like she was just now realising why he’d found his breakup with Juliette so easy to deal with and why it had been necessary in the first place. She’d asked him before he’d broken up with Juliette if it was because of Adalind and he hadn’t lied when he said it wasn’t but now he got the impression Rosalee was re-evaluating things. He got the impression she was considering things differently now.

He hoped her friendship with Juliette didn’t make her think less of him. It wasn’t like he’d realised he was developing feelings for Adalind, they’d just kind of snuck up and smacked him in the face.

But, you know, in a pleasant way.

‘It’s weird,’ Nick agreed. ‘But it works.’

Telling Monroe and Rosalee that he and Adalind were (more or less) officially dating was one thing, telling Hank was another thing entirely. At least with Monroe and Rosalee they’d had some kind of warning, albeit not much of one. Hank knew nothing about Adalind being in town, he knew nothing of the relationship they’d been building and he still seemed to be a bit confused over Nick’s break-up with Juliette.

Although Hank hadn’t really said anything of the sort, Nick got the impression his partner still thought their break-up was something they’d get over and Nick just couldn’t be bothered trying to explain to Hank how completely untrue that was. Especially when they were in the middle of a case that was making Wu suspicious and had Nick juggling all of the lies and half-truths in a precarious gamble that he just knew was going to blow up in his face.

Bud, as much as he’d loved Juliette, seemed to understand exactly where he was coming from. ‘She didn’t want to marry you and have kids with you?’ the eisbeber was shocked by the reason behind their break-up (though not by the break-up as it seemed Trubel had already shared that news). ‘Why wouldn’t she want those things with you?’ Bud genuinely didn’t understand and his befuddlement drove home how much the support and friendship of the wesen in his life meant to Nick.

‘She thought it was too dangerous,’ Nick said.

Bud scoffed, he actually scoffed at the suggestion and it made Nick grin. He wondered how supportive Bud would be to learn that he was now shacking up with a hexenbiest who was pregnant with the child they’d conceived while he was still dating Juliette.

‘She always seemed so nice,’ Bud mused. ‘I can’t believe she could hurt you like that.’

Nick clapped a hand on Bud’s shoulder, oddly touched. ‘I’m okay,’ he told his friend before he steered Bud back to the reason for his visit to the police station.

Before he left Bud asked Nick if he’d heard from Trubel. ‘She was acting a bit strange before she left,’ he seemed concerned and Nick could admit that before she’d left he’d been worried as well.

‘She called a couple of days ago,’ he assured Bud. ‘She sounded fine. Better even.’

‘Good, that’s good.’

‘You heard from Trubel?’ Hank asked, after Bud had gone. Wu had disappeared off to check a ghost of a connection Bud had managed to dig up between their two victims and so he and Hank could talk freely about the other Grimm without Wu asking too many awkward questions.

‘She called to check in,’ Nick replied, which he supposed was the truth, it just wasn’t all of the truth. Trubel had called, she just hadn’t called him. She’d called Adalind and Nick had spent the entire five minutes of their conversation down in the tunnel attempting to get through the door and when he’d popped up though the hatch it was to catch Adalind saying goodbye.

He hadn’t even known Trubel had Adalind’s number and he certainly hadn’t expected that the younger Grimm would call her if she had. While he’d never gotten the impression Trubel disliked Adalind, he hadn’t thought she’d liked her much either. Though he supposed you didn’t have to like someone to ring them for help, you just had to trust that the information they were going to give you was reliable. And that was all Trubel had been after, checking in was just a side effect of calling Adalind for help.

Apparently, she and Josh had run into a hexenbiest during their attempts to clean up Josh’s home and reclaim it from the men who had tossed it looking for the keys. According to Adalind, Trubel had just wanted to get a better understanding of the hexenbiest’s motivations and had figured the best person to ask was another hexenbiest.

The whole conversation (and phone call) had left Nick flummoxed, which had amused Adalind but he couldn’t exactly tell Hank any of that, he hadn’t yet figured out how to bring up the topic of Adalind in any friendly context, let alone one that was a glaring reminder of what she was capable of.

‘She and Josh seem to be doing okay,’ Nick added. ‘They’re still trying to work out how the Royals knew to find him or even to look for his father.’

Hank shrugged, he didn’t have any idea how or why that had happened either but he, like Nick, trusted that Trubel would find the answers, even if she simply resorted to beating them out of someone.

Nick really hoped she chose a different path. He suspected Wu was keeping tabs on her movement and if her name flashed up in another state with an arrest or even just a caution, Wu would be right back to asking those awkward questions.

It was beginning to feel like all he was doing was lying to the people he considered his closest friends. About the only consolation was that Monroe and Rosalee knew everything. Well, mostly everything, he still hadn’t quite worked out how to bring up the baby without them assuming that was why he was with Adalind. He figured if he gave it a little more time, just for them to get used to Adalind being in his life then it would go over much better and they wouldn’t go making any assumptions.

As the one in the relationship with Adalind, Nick could say with complete honesty that you couldn’t make any assumptions about their relationship. He was a Grimm with some pretty serious feelings for a hexenbiest. They had a really complicated past and an even more complicated present which was looking to be leading into something so ridiculously chaotic in the future that it was beyond complicated.

Which was fine with Nick, he liked that Adalind was complicated, that she turned his life upside down. He especially liked that now that he was in a relationship with her and all of the reasons not to were off the table, he could let her make him stupid.

And boy did she make him stupid.

Still, he could now cross sex in a public bathroom off his bucket list. And an elevator, though Adalind insisted it didn’t count because it was their elevator. She let him have the woods, though, because they never actually quite made it back to the trailer or his property that one time Adalind got it in her head to try and follow the path of Fuentes.

It had been fast, hot (until they realised it was January and then even their excitement couldn’t keep them from feeling the chill) and ended up with round three in the shower as they tried to get warm. They weren’t going to talk about round two because, well they just weren’t.

It would not be unfair to compare them to a couple of hormonal teenagers. Or, well, a hormonal (horny, always horny) pregnant woman and the boyfriend who wasn’t about to turn down unplanned sex when it could result in an unfortunate emotional meltdown and, as it did the one time he tried it (he drew the line at well-lit parking lots), a weird outburst of worry that he somehow found her unattractive.

Thankfully, he could do other things in well-lit parking lots.

And there was that whole Adalind made him stupid thing. He wondered if that would be a viable excuse to give Hank when he eventually figured out how to broach the topic with his partner. Could he claim stupidity and leave it at that?

‘I make you stupid?’

And he probably shouldn’t have told Adalind about it, she spent enough time amused by him, he didn’t need to go giving her more ammunition. ‘Maybe,’ Nick conceded and then, because he wasn’t sure he should be admitting it, he confessed guiltily, ‘I kind of like it.’

This only made her grin wider and gave him all sorts of thoughts that were not at all appropriate to have in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday while out eating ice cream and surrounded by kids and teenagers, half of whom appeared to be slipping their parents control on sugar rushes and the other half appeared to be moodily staring at their phones. Worryingly, it was an even split as to whether or not the teenagers had the market on moody phone staring.

‘You like that I make you stupid? How do I make you stupid?’ The way Adalind asked the question, biting her lip to contain yet another smile as she tried not to laugh at him, made him roll his eyes.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t take the question somewhat seriously. The table they were sharing was small, it was easy to lean across the corner so their heads were close enough their noses were almost touching. ‘You make me do things I never thought I’d do,’ he told her quietly. ‘Things I’m sure are mostly illegal and others that are only indecent.’

Adalind licked her lips, the action had nothing to do with her ice cream. ‘Indecent, huh?’

He kissed her, tasting the absolutely horrible combination of ice cream and topping she’d been using to satisfy her cravings. It was the entire reason they’d come out for ice cream and when she’d ordered the teenage girl behind the counter had looked horrified until the boy manning the counter alongside her had asked, simply enough, if she was having pregnancy cravings.

Needless to say, he pulled away a lot faster than he would have liked and pulled a face. Adalind tried to follow to continue the kiss but he laughed. ‘How can you eat that?’

‘Oh,’ she seemed to realise he wasn’t about to take that any further in public and glanced down at her cup of half eaten cherry, mint and liquorice flavoured ice cream with caramel topping. ‘Ugh, I know. Your child wants the craziest things.’ She looked back up at him and her gaze was sizzling with heat. ‘I’m done eating.’

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed, he could feel his own desire ramping up to meet hers. ‘Me too.’

They did not add another parking lot to their list. That’s not to say they actually made it home.


	13. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a boy!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 12

 

And life went on as normal. Because, yeah, for Nick, normal was standing ankle deep in rotting leaves and filthy water looking down on the body of a homeless man that had been half eaten by and animal of some sort. The floodlights CSU had set up to illuminate the area under the bridge where the man had been found did little to disperse the gloomy atmosphere but at least they gave him a good look at the body.

He didn’t think he and Hank would have pulled the case if the man died of exposure and ended up as something’s dinner.

‘Can’t say what chewed on him as yet,’ the medical examiner informed them. ‘But this is why I called you.’ He rolled the body over with the help of his assistant and treated them to a nice look at the homeless man’s back. A square had been cut through the back of his jacket and the three shirts he wore underneath. Carved into the milky white skin of his back were the words “sins of the father”.

The first thing Nick noticed had nothing to do with the words, it was the fact that beneath the clothes the man’s skin was clean and a closer look at his clothes showed they weren’t as dirty or worn as you’d expect from a vagrant on the street. The square that had been cut out of his clothes had been done with a sharp clean blade and the edges were smooth and not jagged. Likely, whoever had done it had used a pair of material scissors.

‘Cause of death?’ Nick asked, frowning at the shelter of cardboard and blankets he’d taken to be the man’s home.

‘That would be this.’ The body was rolled again and the shirt pulled back from the shoulder to reveal a narrow cut on the man’s neck. ‘Hit an artery, would have bleed out in minutes.’

‘No blood here, though.’

‘So the body has been moved,’ Hank concluded. ‘Wu, we got an ID on our victim?’

‘Victim is Geoffrey Werner, forty-seven, reported missing by his daughter three weeks ago,’ Wu read from his notebook. ‘Body was found by a cyclist, Morris Lu – got his statement but he didn’t see anything or anyone around the body.’

They poked around the scene some more but aside from discovering the owner of the shelter, there wasn’t much to see. The owner reeked of alcohol and seemed just as surprised as the cyclist had been to find a body in front of his usual haunt. He couldn’t tell them anything they hadn’t already learned for themselves. Neither the cyclist or the homeless man recognised the victim, neither of them had been around when the body was dumped and the previous evening’s rain seemed to have washed away any tracks that might have been left on either side of the bridge.

With nothing else to gain from the scene, Hank and Nick headed to notify Werner’s daughter of her father’s passing. Gail Werner was barely eighteen and she was busy getting her younger twin brothers ready for school when they knocked on her door. She seemed to know why they were there just from the sight of them on her doorstep.

‘Please just let me get them off to school,’ she asked quietly. ‘I don’t want them to hear this yet.’

They stood aside and let her pass, leading her brothers by the hand. The school bus stopped at the corner and Gail stood at the gate and watched them both walk to the corner and get on the bus. Only when the bus had pulled away and turned into the next street did she return to them.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hank told her. ‘Your father’s body was discovered this morning.’

She nodded, eyes filling with tears and motioned for them to follow her inside. ‘How did it happen?’ she asked, when they were settled in the living room on mismatched furniture.

‘We’re still waiting for the medical examiner to determine that,’ Hank explained. ‘Did your father have any enemies?’

Gail shrugged. ‘I don’t really know; he hasn’t really been around much since mom ran off with my dentist.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nick murmured. ‘Has he been working late? Seeing somebody?’

‘Working mostly,’ she explained. ‘That was how I knew he was missing,’ she elaborated. ‘When his boss called and said she hadn’t seen him for a couple of days I knew something was wrong. I just assumed he’d been sleeping at the office or that he’d been coming home late and leaving early.’

‘When was the last time you saw or spoke with your father?’ Hank questioned.

‘I got a text from him, telling me he’d put more money on my credit card about a week before he went missing,’ she told them. ‘I guess we saw him for dinner a couple of days before that? It’s mostly just me and the twins these days.’

They talked with Gail some more, trying to get a feel for what might have happened to her father but she couldn’t tell them much. When it became clear he wasn’t coping well with his wife running off with their dentist, Gail had been forced to drop out of college to take care of her brothers. She’d had to take on a lot of responsibility and so although she seemed sad about her father’s death it didn’t seem to have changed much in her daily life. He hadn’t been around much for months, it made no difference that his absence would be official now.

It would be tough but Nick thought she stood a good chance of keeping her brothers once CPS got involved.

They talked to Werner’s boss next but aside from noticing a new devotion to his work she couldn’t say she’d noticed much in the way of threats or concerns. ‘He’s been a mess since his wife left him,’ she shrugged. ‘I’ve taken to calling Gail just to let her know he’s still at work. I don’t know of anyone that might want to hurt him.’

‘He wasn’t working on anything important?’ Hank hazarded.

Werner’s boss shook her head. ‘We’re not that kind of business,’ she explained. ‘We mostly handle small businesses, not huge corporations that might have a reason to dodge their taxes. Mostly the worst thing we come across is our clients filling out the wrong form or forgetting to include their receipts when they claim something.’

They talked to a couple of co-workers after Werner’s boss but neither of them could offer any insight into what had gotten Werner killed. No one had any idea what the words on his back were about. They had to hope that Wu turned up similar crimes in his search through ViCAP and if that failed there was always the standard internet search.

Sometimes you got more out of a standard Google search than ViCAP which either said a lot about the wealth of dirt available on the net or about the failings of ViCAP.

After talking to Werner’s co-workers turned up nothing useful, Nick and Hank returned to the station to see what Wu had scrounged up. Adalind texted him on the drive back to remind him they had an appointment with her OB at 6pm. The reminder made him grin and that must have set alarm bells of in Hank because he found himself under close scrutiny when they arrived back at their desks.

‘What?’

‘You’re not as moody as I thought you’d be,’ Hank observed.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I guess I just expected more moping since your break-up with Juliette but you seem fine.’

Nick shrugged. ‘I guess I was prepared.’

Hank didn’t seem satisfied by his explanation but he also didn’t pry which Nick was grateful for. Wu wandered over to let them know he’d found nothing on the words and that cameras from the surrounding area hadn’t picked up any suspicious vehicles or the body drop. Basically he’d just wandered away from his own desk to share in the complete lack of progress they’d made.

‘I’ve got officers looking around for a possible crime scene but I’m not hopeful,’ Wu mentioned when they caught him up on what they’d found out – just as little as he’d found.

‘I’ll start looking through financials,’ Nick sighed. ‘See if I can’t find motive in there.’

Werner’s financials were clean and so organised it was almost a pleasure searching through them. His own accounts had tax accountant written all over them. Weekly transfers between his main chequing account and his daughters’ were clearly labelled as “food money” and the once a month payment on her credit card (linked to his own) was labelled “bills”, any other one-off payments were labelled just as well, denoting payments for the twins’ activities like swimming lessons, field-trips and doctor’s visits.

He wasn’t a forensic accountant by any means but as far as Nick could tell, every penny of Werner’s money was accounted for. He didn’t have gambling debts his family hadn’t known about, didn’t have a secret obsession with online porn or even any subscriptions to magazines. By all accounts Werner was a boring guy. He’d gone to work and occasionally he’d gone home to see his kids.

Nick couldn’t find any reason for the guy to wind up dead. He called Werner’s ex hoping that there might be something more useful there but she admitted to having no idea what her ex-husband was up to and when he’d asked her about the last time she’d had contact with him she’d been vague and mentioned something about one of the kid’s birthday parties. When he asked her which of her children the party was for she’d shown the kind of woman she truly was.

‘Oh, I don’t know, one of the boys I guess.’

Given that her boys were twins and shared the same birthday, Nick felt confident they were better off with their sister who at least seemed to care that they were clean, fed and well-loved.

He wondered if that was how Adalind’s life had been growing up, only without the loving influence of an older sister. At least he’d had Marie, Adalind hadn’t been so lucky. It made him wonder how Gail Werner felt about her mother leaving and her father throwing himself into work. She’d done a good job of holding things together when he and Hank had visited but there’d been an undercurrent of anger toward her father even after learning he was dead. It hadn’t been a sharp anger, more like a heat simmering beneath the surface.

Sins of the father. Wasn’t that what the message on Werner’s back had read? Just because she’d reported him missing, just because she’d seemed sad he was gone, didn’t mean Gail Werner was completely innocent in her father’s disappearance or his murder. Where had he been the three weeks since she reported him missing? Had he been held somewhere against his will or had he simply given up and wandered off after which he’d ended up on the wrong end of something and gotten killed.

He called down to the morgue to find out if Werner’s body showed signs he’d been restrained but the ME hadn’t found anything to suggest it. The full examination still needed to be done but the preliminary back in the morgue apparently showed that Werner, beneath his filthy clothes, was clean, well shaven and healthy. He bore none of the signs of sleeping rough and no one had any explanation for the clothes. His wallet, keys and phone had all still been in his pockets when the cyclist had found him, although the battery in his phone had died shortly after he’d disappeared. His wallet had ID, credit cards and $24.63 in cash and loose change.

No signs of robbery and his credit cards hadn’t been used to check in to any motels or hotels. He hadn’t withdrawn any cash from any of his three accounts and so as far as they knew he didn’t have the cash necessary to rent a room either.

As far as the evidence went, Werner had simply left work one day and never made it home. There’d been no sign of his briefcase or the laptop he usually carried – though Missing Person’s had flagged the items and sent out a bulletin to all of the pawn and second hand shops in the area. They hadn’t had a single hit which seemed to suggest either Werner himself had stashed the items during his three weeks missing or whoever had killed him still had the items on them.

Either way, it didn’t currently help them track down Werner’s killer. That didn’t stop Nick from running a quick check on the daughter. He wanted to cover all of his bases before he left for the day. He did not want to miss his first chance to join Adalind at her check-up.

It was one thing to look at Adalind’s slightly rounded stomach and know that there was a baby he’d helped create growing in there but it would be another thing entirely to see that proof on a sonagram.

‘Initial findings from the lab just came through,’ Hank announced, narrowing his eyes at his computer screen as he skimmed through the report looking for something that might help them. ‘Here’s something,’ he murmured. ‘ME confirmed time of death as thirty-six hours prior to discovery, but the lab says there was too much animal activity. Looks like the victim was stabbed, carved up and then had his clothes, hand and shoes sprayed with some sort of chemical hormone designed to attract rodents.’

Nick frowned, leaning back in his chair. ‘So whoever killed our victim tried to feed him to rats?’

‘Apparently.’

Wu peered over Hank’s shoulder at the report and took down the name of the chemical. ‘I’ll see if I can find out who sells this and who might have bought it.’ He straightened up and locked onto something behind Nick. ‘Uh, Nick, I think you have a visitor.’

Even as he was spinning around in his chair, Hank said, ‘Juliette, how’re you doing?’

Nick appreciated the heads-up Hank had given him. ‘Juliette,’ he greeted, he didn’t sound happy to see her, more like mystified as to why she was there. It made it next to impossible to avoid her when she turned up at his work.

‘Nick,’ she greeted and she sounded uncomfortable and sad which he tried not to let get to him. Yes, he’d been the one to finally end things but she’d essentially driven him away. Thinking about Adalind’s appointment with her OB later he felt that she might have inadvertently driven him right toward something better.

He would never tell her that, though, he wasn’t an ass who wanted to see her in pain.

‘What are you doing here?’ He was aware that Hank and Wu were both listening to every word, although they were probably trying to make it look like they were doing some work. Neither of them knew the finer details of what had happened between him and Juliette, just that they wanted different things now.

‘There are things we need to talk about,’ she reminded him. ‘The house and things.’

‘Oh.’ Nick checked his watch. It was just after five and although he didn’t have to pick Adalind up until 5:30, he didn’t imagine this conversation with Juliette would be a quick one. Although, getting Adalind involved as a lawyer might not be the worst thing – as long as Juliette was completely unaware of who was representing him. As far as he knew Adalind’s licence to practice was still valid.

And wow did he have a really bad habit of thinking about Adalind when he was supposed to be having serious conversations with Juliette.

‘I don’t actually have time right now,’ he apologised, although he didn’t feel sorry at all. Things between them were still awkward and he didn’t want to sit through another attempt by Juliette to make him see things could be different. He hoped she’d come to terms with their break-up by now but as the only person who might have the answer to that question was Rosalee and he hadn’t actually asked her, he didn’t know what Juliette was thinking or feeling.

It was strange, not knowing what was going on with her but it also felt good. If he didn’t know then chances were she was far enough away from the wesen stuff that it wasn’t affecting her life anymore. He hoped.

‘It won’t take long,’ Juliette prodded.

Nick sighed and looked over his shoulder at Hank and Wu who completely failed to cover their interest in the conversation. ‘Call me if you track down that hormone.’

They both nodded but Hank, ‘We’ve got it covered.’

‘I’ll walk you to your car.’ Nick pushed himself out of his chair, gathered up his jacket and slipped it on before he scooped his phone off his desk and pocketed it. ‘I really only have ten minutes,’ he told Juliette as he led her out into the hallway and toward the elevators.

They were the only ones in the elevator making the ugly tension between them more than obvious. Nick didn’t know what Juliette wanted from him so he was waiting for her to speak first. He didn’t know why she was so tight lipped.

‘It’s really over, isn’t it?’ she asked, as the elevator door opened onto the first floor and they stepped out into the lobby. ‘Between us, I mean.’

Nick nodded.

‘I guess I just thought with some time you might change your mind, that you might be willing to wait.’

‘For what?’ Nick asked, annoyance flashing in his eyes as he looked over at her. ‘Wait for you to decide my life isn’t dangerous? Or for you to decide that you’ll marry me but won’t have kids with me? Or am I just supposed to wait five years expecting things to change only for you to turn around and end it because you can’t have that life you want?’

Juliette flinched at the venom in his words but she didn’t look away. ‘I want those things with you Nick,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve always wanted those things with you.’

‘You want those things with the man I was five years ago,’ Nick pointed out angrily.

‘No,’ Juliette said quietly. ‘I want those things with you.’

Nick scoffed, turning away from her and continuing out of the building and toward the steps leading down to the street. He didn’t believe her words, didn’t want to believe them. How dare she turn around now when he’d found something new, something different with someone who could and would – heck she was – give him the things he wanted. He didn’t want to hear Juliette telling him the things she thought he wanted to hear. Maybe if she meant them, maybe if she’d said them earlier, it might have made a difference but it had been over a month now, maybe even two, and he wasn’t about to take her words to heart.

He didn’t want to and he didn’t need to.

‘Nick please,’ she pleaded, reaching out to grab his arm and stop him from walking away.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Just because you’ve decided now that you’re willing to consider – because I don’t for one second believe you could go through with it – it’s too late. I don’t want those things with you.’

This time, Juliette looked as though he’d slapped her. She reeled back from him and the honesty behind his words as though he’d struck her a physical blow. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes,’ he told her firmly, ‘I do. I don’t care what you do with the furniture, I don’t care if you sell the house or buy me out, just let me know when you’ve decided and I’ll sign the paperwork. You can put my share of the joint account in my personal one and then we’ll close it. You wanted to have a normal life, Juliette, well this is what it looks like.’

He turned away from her then and walked back inside. He heard her calling after him but he ignored her. He was so mad at her, so angry that she turned up now, weeks later, trying to offer him everything he’d wanted (without actually offering) when it was too late. If she’d come to him sooner maybe he’d have listened, maybe he wouldn’t have, but not now. Now he had something with Adalind, something he was really enjoying exploring, and he wasn’t about to give that up just because Juliette might change her mind.

He deserved better than that and so did Adalind.

He liked the relationship he was building with Adalind, it felt stronger than any relationship he’d been in before, probably because they’d already seen the worst in each other, they’d already hurt each other and they’d had to come back from that. Build the trust and friendship back first before they could ever try anything more.

It wasn’t the most conventional way to start a relationship but, well, it felt right. He liked, and he never thought he’d say this in a million years, but he liked that Adalind was a hexenbiest, he liked that it gave her a better understanding of the things he dealt with, the curveballs life liked to throw at him. When he’d come home limping the week before, after he’d gotten into a fight with something blue and scaly he’d never seen before that had a ring of horns around the crown of its head and a couple of bony knobs on the fist it had hammered into his thigh, she’d winced and told him he’d better climb into the shower quick.

He'd looked at her in confusion but she was already hustling him into the bathroom and tugging his arms out of his jacket when the strangest feeling crept over him and he stumbled. For a moment the world had tilted sideways and then he’d been struck with an icy chill that spread from what he’d thought was just a bruise on his thigh right down to his toes and all the way up to his head. After that he’d been eager to help her strip him down and didn’t complain when she shoved him forcefully into the steaming water.

As he’d stood under the shower head shivering she’d explained to him the wesen he’d encountered was actually what the Norse had once called Jotnar or Jotunn and that when the bony horn on their hands broke skin they interjected a poison that gave their victims a nice bout of hypothermia.

‘It usually takes a couple of hours for the poison to spread enough before it kicks in,’ she’d explained helpfully.

Adalind hadn’t been the least bit worried and so he’d just calmly stood under the water shivering until the poison started to wear off and then she’d bundled him into sweats and shoved him into bed before she brought him hot soup and tea.

He liked that Adalind just handled these things, liked that she didn’t make a big deal about the fact that he’d turned a little blue himself in the shower, that she’d just rolled with it, sorted him out and then joined him in bed to help keep him warm.

Adalind made getting attacked and nearly frozen by a wesen normal. He needed that. He liked that. Here was a woman he found attractive, who could give as hard as she got, who was smart, funny, confident and who told him when he was being an idiot, who wanted him just as much as he wanted her and who wanted the same things from their relationship that he did.

Why the hell would he ruin that by running back to Juliette and her unfulfilled promises? He loved Juliette, he probably always would but he was no longer in love with her. He didn’t like that she saw his being a Grimm as something he should turn his back on. He didn’t like that she only wanted that future he’d thought they both wanted with a version of him that didn’t exist anymore.

Juliette wanted a part of him, Adalind wanted all of him.

He’d just pulled up in front of the Law Building when Adalind sent him a text asking that he come to her office because she had something heavy she wanted him to carry to the car. He’d never been to her office before but it was easy enough to find. She had a plaque on the door with her name on it and everything which made him feel absurdly proud. This might not have been the career she’d planned for but at least she had an actual office and not a cubicle or something roughly the size of a cupboard she had to share with three other people.

He knocked on the open door when he arrived and stepped inside. It wasn’t a big office but it was big enough to hold a large desk, a couple of file cabinets and a hip high book case that ran along the wall under the window. The top of the bookcase was covered in piles of papers and stack of notes, all carefully arranged (he was sure) and placed in plastic trays. Apparently, she had more paperwork to handle than a standard in-tray could cope with. He knew she relished the challenge.

She was standing in front of her desk talking to a grey haired woman who was wearing worn jeans, a crisp white shirt and a dark coloured blazer. She’d paired the outfit with a scuffed pair of black boots. They both turned at his knock and Adalind smiled. The woman eyed him up and down and then nodded, apparently in approval. She was younger than he’d have expected given the grey hair, only in her early fifties at the most, but he imagined being a college professor came with a lot of stress.

She reached out a hand for him to shake and introduced herself. ‘Ava Rothschild,’ she smiled. ‘Adalind’s boss.’ She had a crisp Scottish accent and sharp blue eyes. He remembered the voice from the reference he’d given all those months ago.

Nick shook her hand, smiling in return, ‘Nick Burkhardt.’

‘I was just telling Adalind how much we enjoy having her working with us,’ she told Nick. ‘Much better than that squirrely bastard we had before she came along. I don’t know who bloody hired him but I’m glad they didn’t get a chance this time. We’d have ended up with that idiotic daughter, Richards keeps trying to pawn off on us.’

Bemused, Nick looked to Adalind who said, ‘Well, I’m glad you hired me too.’

He laughed. ‘You ready to go?’ She nodded. ‘What am I supposed to be carrying to the car?’

‘Oh,’ Adalind gestured to an unassuming box just inside the door. ‘It’s just a few term papers I need to mark but Ava didn’t want me lifting it.’

Ava nodded her agreement. ‘When you’re pregnant is about the only time you’ll get a man to lift anything,’ she said wisely. ‘Use and abuse it while you can.’

Adalind laughed and Nick rolled his eyes good-naturedly as he bent down to pick up the box. It was heavy, there had to be more than a “few” term papers in there but he didn’t complain. ‘It was nice meeting you,’ he told Ava.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Adalind said before she followed Nick out the door. He glanced back to give a last smile to Ava and frowned.

‘Was she just checking out my ass?’ he asked incredulously.

Adalind shrugged. ‘You have a fabulous ass.’

Nick didn’t really have a response to that. He’d heard a lot about Adalind’s boss but he couldn’t say the stories had prepared him for the live version. She was definitely something.

As he drove to the clinic he told Adalind about his confrontation with Juliette, mostly because he wanted her opinion on the whole house issue. If he managed to slip into the conversation how he’d turned her down when she offered him everything he wanted, then it was only because he wanted Adalind to know that it was too little too late. He figured the way she kissed him when they got out of the car said she’d understood exactly what he’d been trying to do and appreciated that he wasn’t making a big deal about it.

There was one other couple in the waiting room and a nervous looking woman who couldn’t seem to keep still. Adalind signed in and they went to sit down. Nick couldn’t say he’d ever been in the waiting room of an OB-GYN before but he could say the wait was just like any other doctor’s office. Excruciating. He wondered if the nervous woman was waiting on some important news, her anxiety levels would match someone who was waiting on test results.

Adalind’s hand landed on his knee and he realised he’d been nervously bouncing it up and down. He knew he and Adalind were having a baby, he’d been watching the growing evidence form over the last few weeks but the prospect of actually seeing their child had him full of nervous energy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so excited or so terrified.

This would make it real in a way merely looking at Adalind’s growing belly couldn’t.

‘Are you nervous?’ Adalind asked in a low voice. She sounded amused again. Why was everything he did so amusing to her?

‘No,’ he told her honestly. ‘Excited? Yes. Terrified, definitely, but I’m not nervous.’

‘You know you can tell Monroe and Rosalee if everything looks good today,’ she reminded him.

It was something they’d talked about, when to tell people and who. She’d had to tell her boss (for obvious reasons) but he hadn’t told anyone. Monroe and Rosalee were the only ones that even knew he was living with Adalind and although Monroe knew he had some sort of feelings for her – which meant Rosalee definitely knew – no one knew he was in a serious relationship with Adalind. No one knew how deep he was already in.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed, suddenly, ‘how the hell am I going to tell my mom?’

‘I’d start with “you’re going to be a grandmother” and then just ease into the rest from there,’ Adalind advised, sounding like she’d already considered how she might have the conversation.

‘Yeah,’ Nick sighed, ‘That’ll be a fun conversation.’

Adalind shrugged. ‘I think your mom kind of liked me. In her own way. I thought about it, after she left with Diana, she said something to me after she’d been arrested. I think she was trying to make sure I understood.’

‘I wonder what Diana will think about being a big sister?’ Nick mused.

Adalind smiled, though it was a tight smile. ‘I hope we get to find out.’

He squeezed her hand then, offering her wordless support and a nurse called her name. He tugged her to her feet and led her into the examination room. Any conversation that happened after that – and he was sure the doctor asked Adalind some questions about her health – was completely eclipsed the moment Nick saw his child on the monitor. He couldn’t stop staring. The baby was so small but so unbelievably perfect. Nick hungrily took in every finger and toe and grinned when the baby start moving around a bit, wondered what it felt like to Adalind or if she could even feel it at all yet.

He felt Adalind squeeze his hand and tore his eyes away from the monitor for a moment to smile at her. ‘Are you even listening?’ she laughed.

‘What?’ he asked, eyes drawn back to the monitor.

‘Nick,’ Adalind half-laughed, half-sighed in exasperation. ‘It’s a boy.’

Nick was not ashamed to admit he teared up a little. ‘A boy?’ he repeated in awe. He turned to Adalind, still grinning like a loon, ‘We’re having a boy.’

Sitting in that room, staring at the monitor showing his son, Nick had no regrets.


	14. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learns a few interesting truths and Nick deals with the awkward break-up paperwork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for the kudos and the wonderful comments!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 13

 

He’d spent so long trying to hide his relationship with Adalind from everyone that it turned out when he was being perfectly careless with the secret no one even noticed. Honestly, he was a little bit ashamed of his partner’s complete and utter failure to notice.

He’d talked it over with Adalind after their doctor’s appointment, everything with the baby was okay, the little guy was growing exactly as he should be (according to the doctor and a little research Nick might have been doing on the side) so they were getting to the point where if he didn’t start explaining to his friends how much of a part of his life Adalind was then they were never going to believe he actually wanted to be with her and not just the child they’d created together.

Because it was going to be sooner rather than later that it all became a little obvious. That didn’t mean Nick was about to openly shout to the world he was in a relationship with Adalind, the world didn’t much care about his relationship status and the only people he cared about knowing the truth, well, two of them already knew most of it, one of them was completely oblivious and the fourth was an honest mystery he hadn’t realised it sooner.

But going up to Hank and point blank asking how he’d not noticed Nick was in a relationship at all, let alone one with Adalind was a bit too much for right now so the plan was to tackle the other thing. There was just a bit too much going on now and Nick was honestly getting tired of juggling so many secrets. So they’d talked it over, he’d made dinner and between pondering how best to break the news to his mother that she was going to be a grandmother (“and hey, guess what, it’s not with Juliette” was probably something he should phrase better) he and Adalind talked over how to tell people in their life (well his life) that he was quite happily in a relationship with a woman who had gleefully tried to kill him on more than one occasion.

‘To be fair,’ Adalind pointed out, twirling her fork in her spaghetti, ‘you tried to kill me too.’

‘Yes,’ Nick agreed. ‘But these are my friends so they naturally sided with me.’

‘Point.’

What it all came down to was that Nick didn’t particularly want to announce it, he didn’t like the idea of just pulling Hank aside and blurting out that he was in a relationship with Adalind and oh by the way we’re having a baby and Adalind didn’t much like the idea that announcing their relationship in such a way would likely have Hank demanding they look for an antidote to yet another love spell and so they’d come up with their winning plan to just not tell anyone but not go out of their way to hide things.

Which was how Nick came to be equal parts amused and annoyed that he’d been surfing the web for a full ten minutes reading reviews on different types of strollers and whether or not they needed to be forward or rear facing (and did he want one that could be lifted out and double as a car seat?) and Hank had completely failed to notice.

It was all just a bit anti-climactic and so he rang Adalind around lunch (from his desk right beside Hank) to tell her that their plan may have been a little too successful and they talked for a good five minutes about dinner and whether or not they should just reheat some leftovers and still Hank didn’t notice.

By 3pm they still didn’t have a case, he’d gotten bored with trying to find ways to subtly let Hank know about the change in his relationship status and so he decided to knock the other secret off his list.

‘Come on,’ he said to Hank, closing the browser on a parenting blog (it was a slow day, a really, really slow day), ‘Let’s take Wu to the trailer.’

‘What?’ Hank said, looking over at Nick with a frown on his face. ‘Now? You want to tell him now?’

Nick shrugged. ‘I thought maybe I’d try revealing my Grimm secret without the life or death urgency.’

Hank nodded, though it was somewhat reluctant, which surprised Nick. ‘You don’t think we should tell Wu?’

‘Nah, it’s not that,’ Hank assured him ‘He needs to know, it’s just, it was easier to believe it when it was right there in front of me.’

‘That’s why we have Monroe.’

‘True.’

They rounded up Wu, who looked a little suspicious when they motioned for him to get in the backseat. ‘Uh, what’s going on guys?’

‘We’re finally going to tell you the truth,’ Nick said easily, he was finding, now that he’d determined he was going to explain things that he wasn’t nearly as nervous or worried about Wu’s reaction. By this point, Wu would surely have formed a few weird (possibly incorrect) assumptions of his own and it was only fair that Nick straighten them out before Wu saw too much or felt the need to take his concerns higher up.

Because Nick had no trouble believing Renard would turn it right back around on him and force him to deal with Wu.

So this was just him being proactive. Finally.

‘Is this the part where you take me out to the middle of nowhere and kill me?’ Wu joked when he realised they were heading out of Portland and deeper into the forest.

‘No,’ Nick told him. ‘I’ve buried enough bodies out here.’

Hank shot him a weird look but Wu laughed like it was all a big joke. Nick gave Hank a look that said he wasn’t joking and they should probably talk about that some time, especially given the fact he wasn’t trying to hide Adalind anymore. The attempts on their lives had eased up but it was only making Nick more nervous – or that might have been the baby. Still, Hank deserved to know that walking around with him after dark put him at even greater risk than normal of being jumped by angry wesen assassins.

Once they were close enough to the trailer (and far enough outside of Portland and the nearest roadside business that Wu couldn’t easily escape) Nick started talking. ‘They’re called wesen,’ he told Wu. ‘All those monsters you’ve been seeing.’

‘What?’ The question sounded like Wu suspected they were telling another joke.

‘Wesen,’ Hank repeated, not taking his eyes off the road. ‘The aswang, that was real. They’re called wesen.’

‘Guys,’ Wu leaned forward so he was resting a hand on both the driver and passenger seats and leaned his head through to look at them both. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘No joke,’ Nick said firmly. ‘The things you’ve been seeing are real and we’ve been lying to you about it for years.’

‘Okay,’ Wu drawled slowly. ‘Why?’

His tone suggested he didn’t yet believe them but that was okay, they were on their way to all of the answers Wu had been searching for. ‘At first, I didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy for seeing the things I was seeing,’ Nick explained. ‘Then it was because I didn’t want you getting involved and getting hurt. I’m telling you now because you are involved and at least if you know what you’re really up against you stand a better chance of surviving.’

‘Surviving,’ Wu repeated dulling.

‘I wasn’t joking about the bodies,’ Nick clarified. ‘My aunt, she had this trailer – that’s where we’re taking you – full of all of the things my ancestors have collected to help fight wesen.’

‘Your ancestors?’

‘I’m a Grimm,’ Nick told him. ‘It means I can see wesen even when they don’t want me to.’

‘And that he’s uniquely capable of hunting them down and killing them.’

‘Not all of them,’ Nick pointed out. ‘Sometimes I make friends with them. Or sleep with them.’

‘You’re telling me monsters are real and you hunt them?’ Wu demanded.

Nick, who had been waiting for some sort of reaction from Hank, took a moment to answer Wu’s question. ‘They’re not all monsters but yes, wesen are real and I’m a Grimm.’

Nick gave Hank a probing look while Wu gave him one of his own from the backseat. How was his partner not commenting on that comment? He’d just tossed it right out there and nothing.

‘You believe him?’ Wu asked Hank.

‘The things I’ve seen? Yeah, I believe him.’

It took a while but by the time they left the trailer Nick thought they had Wu convinced what he’d been seeing was real and that, though they’d been lying to him, he and Hank had been trying to protect Wu and themselves by keeping it a secret.

Just because Wu said he believed, didn’t mean they didn’t take the opportunity to stop by the Spice Shop to get a little show to go along with their tell. Rosalee, as always, was perfectly polite and willing to help.

‘Hello Wu,’ she greeted kindly. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, I’m Rosalee and I guess you’ve already met my husband Monroe.’

Wu nodded, he was looking at the two of them with wide eyes, as though if he stared hard enough he’d be able to see what Nick and Hank had been telling him.

‘Why don’t I go first?’ That was all the warning Rosalee gave before she woged. Nick thought the look on Wu’s face was priceless, his eyes – and Nick hadn’t even thought this possible – got even wider and his mouth fell open. She shook off the fuchsbau and smiled at him to show she didn’t mean him any harm.

‘You,’ Wu began, ‘You’re, a, a…’

‘Rosalee is a fuchsbau,’ Nick finished when it didn’t look like Wu was going to be able to finish his sentence.

Wu nodded and then he turned to Monroe, eyes still wide but with his mouth no longer hanging open. ‘Are you a fuchsbau?’

Monroe woged and Wu leapt backward with a startled yelp. Monroe shook off his woge and smiled apologetically, ‘I’m a blutbad.’

‘Uh huh.’

They talked a little more but Nick wasn’t sure Wu was really taking in any of the answers to his questions, not just yet at any rate. When the questions ran down and Wu was just left looking like his mind had been blown, Hank gently prodded Wu back out of the shop with a wry grin at Monroe and Rosalee. Nick made to follow but Rosalee stalled him with a call of his name.

‘I’d like to have you and Adalind over for dinner,’ she invited. ‘I think we need to get to know the Adalind you know.’

‘Ah, yeah,’ Nick said, ‘We can do that.’

They caught a case on the drive back to the station and so by the time Nick got home Adalind was already in bed. She’d left him a note on the fridge about reheating some leftovers and he tried to make as little noise as possible. Adalind, when he was lying in bed beside her, wasn’t a particularly light sleeper but he’d come to realise that after everything she’d been through, it took a lot for her to feel safe. She always seemed to know when it was him crawling into bed, though, she’d never once tried to kill him for startling her awake for which he was grateful.

That being said, creating life really took it out of her. Some days she could bounce around the loft for hours, so full of energy that he struggled to keep up. Other times he’d come home early and find her asleep on the couch, absolutely wrecked from an ordinary day of work. He hadn’t quite figured out if there was a system to her moods, they seemed mostly random as far as he could tell. The days when he found her sleeping he usually made her a light dinner and then shooed her off to bed. Strangely, he liked those days just as much as he liked the ones where she was full of energy and had a tendency to jump him the moment he walked out of the elevator.

Honestly, it was becoming more and more obvious that it didn’t matter what state Adalind was in, he just liked her. He wasn’t sure if she turned around and started trying to kill him if he’d be able to stop the attraction he felt toward her and that was problematic. At least it would have been if he wasn’t so sure that that Adalind was behind them and that the one he’d come to care for deeply was here to stay.

When he’d finished his quick dinner and tidied up he slipped quietly into their bedroom and began to shed his clothes, gun and badge. They’d have to start thinking about ways to baby proof the loft soon, ways that were going to mean finding more secure hiding places for the weapons he had stashed about the place and remember to keep anything sharp (and Grimm related) out of grabby hands. He figured they had a while before that became a problem but maybe if he started thinking about it now he’d get used to the extra time it would take to retrieve his weapons from their more secure location.

Adalind wriggled into his side once he slipped beneath the covers and he fell asleep wondering what normal parents worried about.

Over breakfast (he made French toast – she covered hers in peanut butter) he told her about Rosalee’s dinner invitation and how he’d finally told Wu the truth about wesen and Grimms. He was amused to realise that she was more worried about the dinner invitation than the possibility that Wu might turn around and try to kill Nick’s friends or start calling them out on all the weird things they’d done that weren’t entirely legal.

‘Well, I guess it’s a good thing my girlfriend’s a lawyer,’ Nick joked.

Adalind smiled in response but it was a thoughtful smile. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever really been someone’s girlfriend.’

‘What?’ Nick didn’t understand how that could be possible.

Adalind shrugged. ‘I dated, I guess you could call it that, in college, but I was always more invested in my studies. And I’m sure now that what I had with Sean wasn’t really a relationship, he doesn’t have girlfriends just women he uses.’ She shrugged again.

Nick didn’t know whether he felt sorry for Adalind or if he felt important for being the first man she could say she’d been in a serious enough relationship with to consider him her boyfriend. Although, he wasn’t sure their relationship qualified them for something so innocent as boyfriend and girlfriend. Those labels just didn’t seem enough to really explain all that they had. You had a girlfriend in high school; he’d always considered Juliette his girlfriend but that didn’t seem to be enough to explain his relationship (or his feelings) for Adalind.

And that thought alone said a lot about his relationship with Juliette. Adalind was becoming his partner in all the ways that mattered, she was so much more than just a girlfriend. She was the woman he lived with, the one he was seriously considering spending his future with (the one he could imagine having a future with), she was the mother of his unborn child, the woman who had fought beside him (more now than she’d ever fought against him). No, girlfriend didn’t seem to be a strong enough word to describe the depth and strength of the relationship they’d built.

‘I don’t think there’s really a word strong enough to explain our relationship,’ he said finally. ‘Saying you’re my girlfriend tells people we’re in a relationship but I don’t think it really expresses how deeply we are in this.’

Adalind chewed thoughtfully for a moment, thinking on his words before she asked, ‘Does it worry you? How quickly this happened?’

‘Do you think it was quick?’

She shrugged. ‘You only just broke up with Juliette, last year we were still trying to kill each other.’ She shrugged again. ‘Sometimes I think it’s too quick, that we want this so badly that we’re rushing in blind.’

Nick considered her words. Yes, there’d been only a few weeks between his break-up with Juliette and their decision (it was really more of a realisation) that he and Adalind wanted to be together but that didn’t make it feel rushed. It didn’t make him feel like the decision had been made in a whirlwind of feelings and emotions once he was free of the strain of his relationship with Juliette.

Eventually he answered with the truth he’d always known but had been hesitant to vocalise because he wasn’t sure it put him in a particularly good light and could maybe be used to label him as a cheater by people who didn’t understand and weren’t so well informed.

‘This thing between us has been building since the morning of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding,’ he said with complete honesty. ‘I don’t know when it happened – not exactly – but at some point we stopped being two people just helping each other out and started being two people who wanted to be in a relationship. It’s not as easy as saying I broke up with Juliette and then I started things with you. I didn’t mean to, neither of us did, but we started this months ago, we just didn’t act on it until Juliette was behind me.’

‘Is that better?’ Adalind wondered.

‘Does it matter?’ Nick countered. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong, we didn’t know what was going to happen when we started this, it’s not like I knew I was going to stop hating you and develop feelings for you.’ He shrugged. ‘It just happened.’

‘Will your friends see it that way?’ She probed. ‘It’s never mattered to me before, what other people think, and suddenly I’m freaking out because I want your friends to like me. I need them to like me, Nick. If something happens to you – or me – they’ll be all this baby has.’

Nick didn’t like the thought of something happening to either of them but he understood what she was saying, where she was coming from. Neither of them had much in the way of family (his mother and her daughter were in hiding together and made up the entirety if their living relatives – as far as they knew) so the friends they did have were pretty much all they had. If something happened to him would Monroe and Rosalee be able to welcome Adalind into their lives? Would they want to?

With those worries in mind Nick spent the day carefully wording an email to send off to his mom. It wasn’t that he was being careful because of the chance someone might read the email it was just that there had been a lot of changes in his life over the last five months and she didn’t know any of it. When he’d sent her messages in the past they’d been quick updates letting her know her message or warning had been received or that he was okay and everything in Portland was fine.

Everything in Portland was fine, at least the parts of it Kelly Burkhardt cared about and so he didn’t want to worry her with an email that appeared out of the blue that might be taken as wholly out of character and send her rushing back to Portland worried he was in some kind of trouble.

But he couldn’t say everything he wanted to say, either, because there was the chance that the wrong person might get hold of his message and learn too much. It was a conversation he really wanted to have face-to-face but, well, up until two years ago he hadn’t even thought this kind of conversation was possible, he’d have had to make do with the knowledge that wherever his mother was she surely knew what he was up to and that he was okay.

Now he knew that she was okay in the sense that she was alive and not just floating about in some idealised version of heaven constructed by a grieving teenager it was a lot harder to find the words. Especially when he wanted to be succinct without leaving too many questions. In the end, he didn’t find the right words but they didn’t make him want to run and hide from the potential response and that was about the best he could hope for.

M,

Changes in Portland. Cut ties with Juliette. Keeping Adalind and new baby safe.

Nick.

‘You know that’s going to have her asking more questions,’ Adalind pointed out with a roll of her eyes when she paused to read his message over his shoulder. ‘And I notice you didn’t actually mention how it’s your baby too,’ she added dryly.

‘It says all it needs to without having her rush home.’

‘I really don’t think it does,’ Adalind contradicted but she didn’t stop him from hitting send on the message. He assumed that was because, as with Monroe and Rosalee, Adalind wanted his mother to like her. They’d gotten along perfectly well despite that whole kidnapping her child thing and Adalind likely wanted to preserve that good feeling now that she was going to be a much more permanent fixture in his life.

They didn’t talk about his avoidance tactics after that, Adalind had some work she needed to finish and Nick busied himself tidying up the dinner (and Adalind’s desert) dishes. He’d pretty much put the email from his mind entirely by the time they went to bed and as the next day started out with an unwelcome phone call and progressed to involve something the Hispanic community called El Chupacabra, he had other things on his mind.

The phone call came from Juliette not five minutes after he’d dropped into his chair at his desk. He debated answering it but, as Hank pointed out, if he didn’t, she might just stop by again and he really didn’t want to deal with that.

‘Juliette?’

‘Nick, hi.’ Her voice was calm but cool and although he couldn’t say he liked the tone he could admit to liking it a lot more than the choked up teary one or the sad voice she’d taken to using every time they’d seen each other. That voice always made him feel like he should be feeling bad for her and created all sorts of uncomfortable (angry) feelings when he couldn’t quite work up the energy to care as he once would have. This cooler tone was much, much better, it said he didn’t have to pretend things were going to get better and he didn’t have to tiptoe around her worried that any little thing he said would be somehow taken the wrong way and give her some hint he was willing to take her back.

And thinking that way made him feel horrible but he was tired of having the same conversation with her over and over again.

Thankfully, she saved him from asking why she’d called. ‘I’ve decided to sell the house, my friend’s found a buyer already and she needs you to sign some of the papers.’

He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised the house sold so quick, it was a nice house, not too big, just perfect for a young family starting out or a couple like he and Juliette had been. ‘Okay, you can send the paperwork over and I’ll sign it.’

‘Can you meet for coffee instead?’ Juliette asked and this time she sounded tired, almost defeated. ‘It’s more than just the house, the utilities, our accounts, everything needs to be sorted out.’

‘You can’t just cancel all of the utilities?’

‘Nick,’ she sounded annoyed with him now. ‘I’ve got a lawyer coming to look over the paperwork and make sure everything is in order.’

Bringing his own lawyer would likely only make things worse, though it was hard to say whether that would be because two lawyers together battling over paperwork could prove disastrous or because the only lawyer he knew (and trusted) was Adalind and that would be uncomfortable and awkward for so many reasons.

He was still firmly trying to keep Juliette from ever finding out about Adalind and not because he didn’t want to hurt her, at this point it was genuinely because it wasn’t any of her business who he slept with, lived with or made a future with. She’d made the choice that had forced him to break things off, she didn’t get any kind of say in how he lived his life now.

‘When?’ Nick asked, not bothering to hide the resignation in his words.

‘Tomorrow at 10? I’ll text you the details.’

It wasn’t a great time but there wasn’t really ever a good time for something like this so he told her he’d make it work and hung up on her. When he looked around he found Hank watching him with a sympathetic though speculative frown.

‘That’s the nastier side of a break-up they never tell you about,’ he mused. ‘The paperwork.’

Nick grunted. ‘She’s going to sell the house, I suppose I’ll get some money out of that, once the mortgage is paid. The place I’m living now doesn’t cost nearly as much.’

Hank frowned. ‘Where are you living now?’

‘We’ve got a loft,’ Nick replied. ‘It’s off the grid, a lot safer than the house was.’

Hank didn’t even seem to notice the use of “we”. Nick was seriously starting to question his partner’s qualifications. Before he could worry overmuch about it, they caught a homicide and suddenly he and Hank were busy trying to keep Wu from freaking out while he dealt with his first wesen case now that he knew there was such a thing as wesen.

When he and Hank slipped into Renard’s office at the end of their shift to give him an update on how their case was going Nick was happy to note that the Captain had finally properly stopped casting speculative looks his way and was more concerned about how Wu was taking the wesen revelation than whatever it was that had had him so closely monitoring Nick’s behaviour.

There’d been a few times here and there over the last few months where Nick was sure that Renard knew Adalind was in town and that she’d been seen with Nick on more than one occasion but he’d never mentioned it and as Nick wasn’t about to bring it up they’d just spent some very awkward briefings exchanging (or avoiding exchanging) looks.

Nick worried that the absence of the looks meant that Renard was up to something and that none of them were going to like it when it came to light but as he wasn’t planning on confronting Renard about the looks it was another thing he would leave unspoken and just keep an eye on. He was finding he had a lot more of those moments now that he and Adalind were together and he wished he could say it was because of her but honestly, he got the feeling that something big was coming and all of the weird looks and odd tension was a direct result of that instead.

He and Adalind hadn’t been attacked by anyone working for the Royals in a while and although he probably should have taken it as a good sign Nick couldn’t help but feel it was actually a sign things were soon going to get much worse.

Though at coffee the next morning it was hard to imagine anything being worse than the tense atmosphere hanging over the booth he and Juliette were seated in with her lawyer friend. Or, well, friend of a friend as it turned out.

Juliette’s lawyer friend of a friend was dressed in a suit and heels that would have done Adalind proud in her time working for Burman. She was immaculately dressed and eyed him shrewdly when he sat down. He got the feeling she was judging his jeans, his unshaven jaw and the scuffed boots he was wearing against Juliette’s simple but nice sweater and leggings and finding him wanting. He didn’t much care that he was being judged, he didn’t much care what this woman thought of him and he didn’t much care that Juliette was eyeing his jawline with a strange look either.

He hated shaving every day and Adalind didn’t mind him with a little facial hair so what did it matter that he no longer looked like the clean shaven and eager man Juliette had fallen in love with?

When he’d told Adalind about his coffee plans she’d given him an impressively sympathetic look and told him he was not, under any circumstances, to sign anything if he didn’t understand exactly what it said. ‘I don’t care about the money,’ she told him, ‘we’re doing okay, but I’m not about to let some lawyer I don’t know force you to sign away something that’s rightfully yours.’

If he’d found her stubbornness attractive in that moment and kissed her thoroughly for it, then that was his business because after this meeting, after all of the paperwork was signed, he would finally be done with Juliette. This time there was no pang of regret over the thought. He was ready to put her well and truly in his past and if that meant one more awkward coffee meet and some paperwork then he was all for getting it over with.

That attitude had earned him a bright smile from Adalind, one of the slightly incredulous ones that said she couldn’t quite believe it was happening but holy crap he was all hers.

He was starting to realise that when it came to Adalind he was oddly possessive. Which was made okay by the fact that she was just as possessive of him. Jesus, their relationship was weird and different and so completely perfect sometimes he wished he’d known what it was to be with her – to love her – back when they’d first met. Things would have been so different if they’d just taken a different path all those years ago.

He’d wondered frequently if things had been different if he and Juliette would have been married by now, if they’d have had children by now, but that was all dependent on his no longer being a Grimm. If things had been different, if he’d known from the start the kind of person Adalind could be he knew they’d be married by now, they’d have children by now.

Sitting across from Juliette and her lawyer friend of a friend, Nick was stunned to realise his only regret was not breaking things off with Juliette sooner.

Loving Adalind was so much more.


	15. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick and Adalind have dinner with Monroe and Rosalee.

Necessary Sins – Chapter 14

 

‘What if they don’t like me?’ Adalind worried, her grip on his hand was tight but he didn’t complain. He was actually amused by her sudden bout of nerves.

‘Then just remind them they stole your baby from you and they’ll have to be nice.’

For a moment it seemed he’d shocked Adalind into silence but then she whacked his arm with more force than necessary and hissed his name reproachfully. ‘That would only make it worse!’

‘Relax,’ he told her. ‘It’s not like you’ve never met them before. They know what to expect.’

‘That’s the problem!’ Adalind moaned. ‘They were around when I left Hank for dead and when I poisoned Juliette,’ she pointed out. ‘Plus they know about me tricking you into almost losing your powers.’

Nick waved that off, he was over it and it wasn’t like she’d ever directly hurt either Monroe or Rosalee so it would probably be easier for them to accept Adalind into their lives than say Hank or Wu who would have the memories of her love cookies to deal with.

‘I thought we were never going to speak of them again,’ she reminded him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nick tried to apologise but it sounded insincere. ‘It’s just really fun to say.’

She tried to whack him again but he dodged away from her, laughing at the way her eyes narrowed in the promise of pain. Monroe must have heard their car pull up because he opened the door on them just as Nick caught her hand, tugged her close and kissed her in quick apology.

‘Well,’ Monroe muttered. ‘I’ll never be able to un-see that.’

Apparently mortified being caught acting like a couple of teenagers, Adalind shoved Nick away and smiled apologetically at Monroe. ‘Hello Monroe.’

‘Adalind.’ Monroe stood back and motioned them inside. His words weren’t cold but they were cautious, still Nick appreciated that he was making the effort.

Rosalee came out of the kitchen as they were entering the living room and she smiled widely at Nick and then at Adalind. ‘It’s nice to see you again Adalind.’

‘Thank you for inviting us over.’

‘Would you like something to drink?’ Rosalee offered. ‘There’s a bottle of wine I’ve been wanting to open.’

‘Oh,’ Adalind replied. ‘Thank you but I’m not drinking at the moment.’

‘Water?’ Adalind nodded and Rosalee turned back to the kitchen.

‘I’m suddenly wondering if a restaurant might not have been less awkward,’ Nick said.

Monroe snorted. ‘Buddy, this was going to be awkward no matter where we ate.’

‘Monroe,’ Rosalee chided. ‘Dinner’s still going to be another half hour.’

In a way, the awkward tension amused Nick but he knew how important it was to Adalind that she made a good impression on his friends. He’d tried to point out that when she wasn’t trying to kill them all she was actually a really fun person so all she needed to do was be herself and everything would be fine. That hadn’t gone down too well. Something about how those past attempts to kill him would prevent them from wanting to get to know her.

‘You know how I finally told Wu about wesen?’ Nick said to break the silence now that they were all sitting. ‘He’s probably still at the trailer learning everything he can.’

‘Really?’ Monroe asked. ‘How did he take it? We haven’t seen him since, you know,’ he made a meaningful shake of his head to indicate his and Rosalee’s demonstrative woges.

Nick shrugged. ‘I think he was just glad to know he wasn’t crazy. He didn’t seem too mad we kept it from him.’

‘Give it time,’ Adalind advised. ‘Once he adjusts he’ll probably be really pissed off you let him commit himself rather than tell him the truth.’

Nick shot her a look but she smiled innocently. ‘Why do I tell you these things?’

‘You wanted my advice,’ she reminded him. ‘Maybe if you’d listened to it he wouldn’t have locked himself in the trailer with a week’s supply of coffee and snacks.’

Nick winced. ‘He did not have a week’s supply.’

‘He’s woken us up twice in the last three days setting off the alarm on the trailer,’ Adalind happily reminded him. ‘He’s planning on being there a while.’

‘You put an alarm on the trailer?’ Monroe asked.

Nick nodded, noticing, now that his attention wasn’t focused on Adalind, that Rosalee was watching them rather intently, head tilted to the side like she was trying to make sense of something – probably them. ‘I think I’m getting paranoid.’

‘I think that’s a pretty common Grimm trait,’ Rosalee laughed, finally looking away from him and Adalind to share an amused look with Monroe.

‘It’s just a camera,’ Nick explained. ‘It’s motion activated but it sets off an alarm at home like all the other cameras at the loft.’

‘It’s less a loft,’ Adalind explained, ‘and more a fortress.’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘It’s not that bad.’

‘We have a secret escape tunnel,’ she informed Monroe and Rosalee. ‘He doesn’t even know where it leads but he expects me to climb down there if something happens.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Nick defended.

‘Dark creepy tunnel with a big steel door at the end he can’t even get open.’

‘Well feel free to jump out the window then,’ Nick said without any real heat behind it. He was perfectly aware Adalind would be down in that tunnel as quickly as she could manage if someone came looking for her. She could complain all she liked but he knew she’d rather lure an attacker into an ambush she could control than wait around for something to attack her.

Assuming she could navigate the ladder while pregnant.

It was Adalind’s turn to roll her eyes. ‘Our windows don’t even open. Though I suppose I could always jump off the roof and plummet to my death but somehow, I think you’d miss me.’ In an aside to Rosalee she said. ‘Actually we have a pretty decent view from the roof. I’ve been thinking of making a little garden up there, just to grow some herbs and spices.’

Whether it was his and Adalind’s easy banter or just his friends’ willingness to accept Adalind, Nick couldn’t be sure but dinner went really well once they’d gotten passed the awkward beginning. Conversation flowed and it never felt like they had to stop and explain something (if it was wesen related) or even worry about how much to say. He’d often felt that way when he and Juliette had been over for dinner with Monroe, it was a novel feeling to realise that of everyone at the table it was actually he who knew the least about wesen.

Adalind excused herself to the bathroom just before they left and Nick found himself the focus of both Monroe and Rosalee’s gazes. ‘What?’

After exchanging a look, Monroe spoke first. ‘Dude!’ he exclaimed, giving Nick no help whatsoever.

Rosalee rolled her eyes at her husband’s inability to articulate their feelings. ‘Nick,’ she began, and there was surprise in her tone, ‘she’s changed so much.’

‘Actually,’ Nick contradicted, ‘she’s just Adalind.’

‘You mean she was always like this?’

Nick nodded. ‘Pretty much. There were a couple of times when we were fighting or trying to kill each other I got to see this side of her.’ He shrugged, not sure how else to explain it. ‘Not going to lie, that contributed to some weird fantasies.’

Monroe and Rosalee looked at him in surprise.

‘And you probably didn’t need to know that.’

‘No.’

‘Really didn’t,’ Rosalee assured him. ‘She’s just, she’s not what I was expecting. I kind of like her.’

Monroe nodded his agreement. ‘It’s against my better judgement but, yeah, me too.’

‘Thanks. She was really nervous about coming here, she wanted to make a good impression.’

Rosalee smiled softly, ‘She succeeded. You should bring her around more often.’

‘Are you done talking about me, yet?’ Adalind asked, stepping into the hallway. ‘I mean I can go back to the bathroom.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘God knows I’ll only have to pee again in five minutes,’ she added, mostly to herself, in a whisper that Nick assumed he wasn’t supposed to hear.

‘We’re done,’ he assured her. ‘Nice things were even said.’

Adalind waved her hand dismissively, ‘You’re always saying nice things.’ In an aside to Rosalee she added, ‘I’m working on this reward system where he gets sex for compliments. Its proving very effective.’

Against her better judgement, Rosalee burst out laughing.

‘And we’re leaving,’ Nick announced, grabbing Adalind’s arm and gently steering her out the front door before she could say anything else that might have him rethinking his decision to let her out of the loft for things other than work.

‘Thanks for dinner!’ Adalind called over her shoulder, smiling widely.

Still laughing, Rosalee waved them off. In the car, Adalind waited until they’d turned off Monroe’s street before she asked what he knew she’d really wanted to know the moment she came back from the bathroom.

‘That went well, right?’ The nerves were back in her voice.

Nick nodded. ‘You succeeded in making them like you.’

‘Are you lying to spare my feelings?’ she accused.

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Monroe said it was against his better judgement but you definitely won Rosalee over.’

‘Rosalee was really nice,’ Adalind admitted. ‘I didn’t expect that.’

‘Why?’ Nick asked, glancing over at her. ‘You’ve met her before and she was nice when she watched over you and Diana.’

‘Yeah but I hadn’t come between you and Juliette then.’

Nick frowned. ‘As childish as it sounds, Rosalee was my friend first, if I’m happy, she’s not going to hold it against you.’

‘Are you?’ Adalind asked softly. ‘Happy, I mean,’ she clarified when he frowned at her.

‘Of course I’m happy,’ Nick said. ‘Did you really think I’d put up with you if I wasn’t.’

That earned him a glare but he just smiled at her. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re not with me because I’m pregnant.’

‘Well, I’m sure that would be a legitimate concern if I hadn’t already been thinking about you naked before I even knew about him.’

‘Picturing me naked is not having a relationship with me,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘I had lots of fantasies about you back when we hated each other. You’re attractive – though I’ve got to say, I’ve had a much better influence on your hair – and I spent a lot of time thinking about you, I had to learn everything I could about you.’

Nick touched his hair self-consciously. ‘What was wrong with my hair?’

Adalind scrunched up her nose. ‘It was all kind of floppy and just,’ she made some sort of motion around her head that was apparently supposed to indicate the disaster she thought his hair had been when they’d first met. ‘And you were all clean shaven – you were very young,’ she concluded.

This time he rubbed his jaw self-consciously. He was suddenly very aware that he’d taken to shaving only every other day and that he had started cutting his hair a little differently. He didn’t think that could be attributed to Adalind (originally) but if he thought about it too much there might be a correlation.

He’d add that to the list of things he hoped Juliette never found out about. He wasn’t even sure why he was keeping a list, it was just that there were things he didn’t want her hearing about from Rosalee and things he didn’t want her hearing about at all. Just because he wasn’t in love with her anymore didn’t mean he wanted to hurt her more than he’d already done.

He thought about making some sort of snappy comment about Adalind’s own looks back then but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, her hair had been a little different but aside from some soft curves that were a bonus of her pregnancy she hadn’t really changed all that much, looks wise. It was annoying. How was he supposed to shoot back at her if he had nothing to complain about?

He supposed he could address the other part of her statement. ‘You fantasised about me?’ he teased.

Adalind grinned. ‘You made for good material. There was that whole corrupting the good guy thing.’

He frowned, amused. ‘You planned to corrupt me?’

She shrugged. ‘It was my back up plan.’

‘To what? Killing me?’

‘I know,’ Adalind said, appalled. ‘What was I thinking? Sleeping with you is so much more satisfying than killing you would ever be.’

‘That’s good to know.’

His phone rang then, cutting off their weird (though enlightening) conversation. He fished it out of his jacket and handed it to Adalind who told him it was Hank and then answered it before putting it on speakerphone.

‘Hank?’ Nick asked.

‘Travis Lowenstein,’ Hank replied. ‘Wu finally got us a buyer for that hormone.’

‘And who is this Lowenstein guy?’

‘He was Gail Werner’s biology partner in high school and has been her boyfriend on and off for the last six months.’

‘Her boyfriend killed her father?’ Nick clarified.

‘It’s looking like it. Wu’s got a couple of uniforms bringing him in for questioning and I’ve got the daughter coming in tomorrow to make a statement.’

‘Are you thinking she knew?’

‘Doesn’t look like it at this point but we’ll check.’

Nick’s phone started beeping, indicating there was another call coming through. He let it go through to voicemail, intending to flesh out some more details of the case when Adalind’s phone started ringing. ‘It’s Monroe,’ she said with surprise, having temporarily taken Nick’s phone off speaker. ‘Did we leave something behind?’

Nick shook his head, a sudden twinge of worry flared inside him. ‘Answer it,’ he told her, like she was planning on doing anything else. To Hank he said, ‘I have to call you back.’

‘Hello?’ Adalind answered, before she hastily ended the call with Hank on Nick’s phone. ‘What? Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker.’

‘Monroe?’ Nick asked.

‘Nick!’ It was Rosalee who answered him. ‘Someone just threw a Molotov cocktail through our front window!’

Alarmed, Nick immediately did a U-turn and started back toward his friends’ house. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No,’ Rosalee said shakily, in the background they could hear Monroe yelling angrily. ‘Some of the neighbours are already helping put the fire out but Nick, it was the wesenrein, it had to be.’

‘We’re five minutes away,’ Nick told her. ‘Just hang on.’

Adalind ended the call and dropped her phone into the cup holder in the centre console. ‘You still haven’t found out who’s behind this, have you?’

He shook his head and slammed his palm against the steering wheel in frustration. ‘We can’t get a name and nobody’s talking. They’re either scared or they don’t know anything.’

‘I feel sorry for them,’ Adalind admitted. ‘At least the people trying to kill me are doing it because of something I did or something I have, not because I’m in love with someone.’

He didn’t like the reminder that people were still after Adalind, the fact that no one had made a play for her recently was actually more alarming than if she’d been fending off constant attacks, but he was suddenly worried for a whole other reason. ‘What if the wesenrein find out about you?’

‘Why would they care about me?’ Adalind asked.

‘You’re a hexenbiest living with a Grimm and having his baby,’ Nick pointed out.

Wholly unconcerned, Adalind waved away his sudden worry. ‘No one even knows about us,’ she reminded him. ‘And like anyone would believe for a second that a hexenbiest and a Grimm would get together for anything other than a fight to the death.’

He was not reassured.

The fire was out by the time they arrived back at Monroe’s and there was already a fire truck and police car as well. He was pretty pleased with the response time. Monroe was livid more than anything, although Rosalee appeared shaken. They might not know each other well, but Adalind did a decent job of comforting Rosalee while Nick talked with the fireman and the uniforms who’d responded to the 911.

A small team from CSU arrived a short while later and took photos of the damage the fire had done in the living room and to the front window, collecting up what evidence they could that hadn’t been heavily covered in foam from a couple of fire extinguishers and water from hoses the neighbours had used to stop the fire from spreading.

His friends refused the offer of a hotel for the night, saying they weren’t about to let the wesenrein scare them out of their own home. Nick organised for a patrol car to spend the night watching the house, for his own peace of mind as much as Rosalee and Monroe’s.

‘Maybe we’ll get lucky,’ Nick tried to reassure his friends. ‘Maybe this time they left behind something we can use to track them down.’

Before they left again, Nick helped Monroe board up the front window with duct tape and some plywood sheets donated by a neighbour. It wasn’t a great job but it would have to do until Monroe and Rosalee could organise their insurance and get someone out to replace the window. He offered to stay but his friends were determined not to let their attackers scare them off and so for a second time in as many hours, Nick and Adalind left Monroe and Rosalee’s house, this time in a much more sombre mood.

Adalind had no trouble falling asleep but Nick couldn’t stop the worries chewing him up. He’d had a conversation once, with Adalind on one of those mornings he’d taken her to work, he didn’t remember how the conversation had come up but he did remember they’d been talking about the Royals finding out where she worked and if her job had enough security to keep her safe.

‘Does it matter?’ she’d asked. ‘I can’t live my life in constant fear. I think we’re both paranoid enough as it is, I’m not going to let it rule my life.’

At the time he’d agreed with her, at the time he didn’t have nearly so much at stake. Would Adalind be a target for the wesenrein if they discovered their relationship? They’d done a pretty good job of keeping it quiet, not only because they didn’t want anyone knowing how to get at her but also because there was that whole how-the-hell-did-this-even-happen thing. The fact that a relationship between a Grimm and a hexenbiest was the least likely match in history worked in their favour.

It didn’t stop him from worrying, though. It didn’t stop him from thinking about everything he could lose. He didn’t know exactly how he’d found himself living with Adalind, in a relationship and having a baby with her, but he would fight really fucking hard to keep it.

He’d fight a lot harder than he had to keep Juliette in his life. Did that say more about his relationship with Adalind or his relationship with Juliette? He wasn’t sure. He and Juliette had been together for so long that things between them just were. When he’d become a Grimm Aunt Marie had told him he should break things of to keep Juliette safe but at the time he hadn’t really understood what being a Grimm meant and so he hadn’t understood why it would be any different to being a cop.

Later, when he’d realised how different it really was, he hadn’t seen a reason to break things off with Juliette because he’d loved her, he’d thought he could keep her safe and he’d selfishly thought that he deserved happiness too. When his own mother had told him to hang onto those he loved he’d just ran with the advice, never once considering that her advice came from a place of regret not one of objective thinking. It had been one extreme or the other but no in between, either he let Juliette go or he held on tightly.

He’d held on too tightly, he got that now, could look back and see it in the way he’d fought for her when she’d lost her memory, the way he’d kept hoping she would want the things he wanted with him and not the old Nick, the one who didn’t exist anymore.

With Juliette it was one or the other, with Adalind it wasn’t like that. He didn’t look at her and feel like he had to let her go or hold her tight. She looked at him and she saw the Grimm and she liked that it made him strong, that it helped him understand her. It was exactly how he looked at her. He saw her and he saw all of the possibilities Juliette had ripped away from him. And he saw more.

Juliette had always looked after herself, she knew how to shoot and felt confident enough in her abilities that she thought she could protect herself. In some ways she could, she could protect herself from an ordinary home invasion (to a certain extent) but she had no way to stand up to the wesen that came for him, the ones that wanted to take her to get to him. She had a confidence in her abilities but she didn’t understand what she’d really be up against.

Hank and now Wu had the kind of training that was supposed to give them an edge but they still struggled. A lot of the time they relied on Nick and Monroe to get the wesen side of things done.

He didn’t have to worry about Adalind so much. It seemed an odd thing to say given that he’d had to rescue her from having her head beaten in by a hundjager all those months ago but he’d also fought against her and beside her enough times to know that she was strong and capable and perfectly willing to play dirty if it meant she survived for the next round.

She’d killed people.

It felt weird to think it but he liked that Adalind had been forced to take that necessary step to protect herself. He didn’t like that she’d had to take a life (or seven) but he liked that she understood the implications, understood the choice that you have to make in that split second between surviving or dying.

He’d never told Juliette about all of the men and women he’d killed. Deaths that occurred in the line of duty he’d told her about, there’d only been one before he became a Grimm and she’d been right there through all of the mandatory counselling and evaluations, but once he’d become a Grimm he’d stopped being able to tell her.

Even once she knew about wesen and Grimms he hadn’t told her the truth of what he’d done. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to see the look on her face when she realised what he’d done, maybe it was simply because he wanted to spare her the knowledge, either way, he’d never clarified anything and let her assume what she needed to sleep at night.

Adalind was different. She’d heard about the Grimm who’d sent back the heads of three reapers as a message, she’d seen him kill, seen the kinds of things he was up against and fought them herself. He could tell her about the wesen he’d killed and the bodies he’d buried that still hadn’t been found because she didn’t judge. She understood.

She’d been there herself.

When it came to Adalind, he wasn’t fighting to hold onto a romance so much as a partnership. He guessed that was what Monroe had meant when they’d been talking about the things he and Adalind did on a daily basis that made him feel like they were in a relationship when they weren’t. He and Adalind met each other in the middle, they shared the burden. He’d never had that with Juliette, in their relationship or his work.

Juliette was someone he loved and cherished and wanted (needed) to protect. Adalind was an equal to stand beside him. The desire to protect her was still there, and now that she was pregnant it blazed hot and strong, but it was also tempered by the knowledge that she felt the same about him. She’d stand beside him willing to fight, wanting him safe, but ultimately they stood together, side by side.

He’d loved Juliette, probably always would, but she wasn’t his equal, not now that he was a Grimm and there were wesen in his life. Adalind was and he wasn’t about to let that go.

If they couldn’t fight this, if the wesenrein found out about her, then he knew they would come to regret it. He didn’t know if it was love (yet) but he would kill for Adalind – already had. It wasn’t a happy thought but it let him finally drift into sleep.

At work the following morning, he barely had the chance to sit down before Renard stuck his head out of his office and called him over. ‘Hank, you too.’

It hadn’t been intentional, not really (at least in the beginning), but Nick had been doing his best to avoid Renard since he’d started seeing Adalind – platonically and otherwise. The few strange looks Renard had sent him after Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding, like he was looking for something very specific in Nick, ad been bad enough, the more recent ones were worse and so avoiding Renard had become something of a necessity when he got that look on his face. 

Besides, now that he knew the history between Renard and Adalind (better than he’d like) it gave him an insight into Renard’s character that more often them not made it hard to look the man in the eye. The more he’d gotten to know Adalind, the more he’d learned Renard really was just a power hungry Royal looking to control a Grimm and fight his way back into power.

Nick sure as hell didn’t want to be anyone’s pet Grimm and he didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of Renard’s play for power. Plus, sometimes looking at Renard’s arrogant face made Nick want to punch him now that he knew how his boss had treated Adalind.

It was a protective urge Nick really could have done without. He had to work with Renard, after all.

‘Where are we on this wesenrein thing?’ Renard asked, when Hank had closed the door behind them. ‘I just got the report on the incident at Monroe’s last night.’

‘What incident?’ Hank asked.

‘There was another attack on Monroe and Rosalee last night,’ Nick explained. ‘Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window and did some damage to the living room.’

‘They okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Nick assured his partner. ‘They stayed there last night – refused to get a hotel room – but we didn’t get any witnesses who could give us a description of the attacker or anything suspicious.’

‘But they’re escalating their attacks,’ Renard observed.

Nick nodded. ‘I know. They’re building up to something we just don’t know what.’

‘And you still don’t have any idea who’s behind this?’

‘None. They don’t really leave any evidence behind and anyone we question about it isn’t talking. They’re all trying to keep well away from it, even if they like Monroe and Rosalee.’ Nick frowned in annoyance. ‘I’m hoping the lab will have some prints for us off the bottle that was used but I’m not holding my breath.’

Renard nodded. ‘Keep me informed.’ They turned to leave but Renard called Nick back, asking for a word. ‘My mother knows about Diana.’

Nick, having never met Renard’s mother, had no idea what he was supposed to say in response to this. ‘Okay?’

‘My mother is very powerful and she’s pushing to know where her grandchild is,’ Renard explained.

‘Well,’ Nick began slowly, ‘I guess it’s a good thing neither of us know where she is.’

‘Have you heard from your mother?’

‘No,’ Nick lied easily. And he supposed, in a way, it was true, he technically hadn’t heard from his mother in a while, most of her emails these days were for Adalind. He didn’t know exactly how she’d come to realise Adalind was the one who got to her emails first but now she generally addressed the simply check-ins to Adalind so she could know her daughter was okay.

The fact he hadn’t heard from her since he sent that awkward (understated) email was something he was considering a good thing just at the moment. He really didn’t know how he was supposed to explain everything that had happened in his life over the last few months that had so completely changed it from what it had been when his mother had last been in Portland.

So really, he wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t heard from his mother, he just wasn’t being completely honest.

Renard eyed him for a beat longer than was necessary, clearly trying to judge whether or not Nick was lying but he must have pulled on a good poker face because Renard nodded and motioned for him to leave. ‘Let me know if you hear anything.’

Nick nodded and then left. He had no intention of telling Renard anything, he hadn’t cared one way or the other about his daughter until his mother wanted to see her. Was that all Diana was to Renard, a way to gain power over the Royals? He’d thought it once before, about how much of a mistake Adalind had made going to him the night his mother had brought her to them for help but Nick struggled too with the idea that Renard didn’t want to know how his daughter was going, that he’d so readily handed her over to them in the first place.

Adalind constantly checked his emails for news from his mother and Nick knew he’d do anything to make sure he saw his son if he was the one to be sent away. It made him glad that Diana had his mother caring for her. She may not have been the first choice to look after a baby hexenbiest but she’d looked at Diana as a mother and not a Grimm. She’d seen that what Diana needed was to be cared for and loved and shown right and wrong in a nurturing environment, not from the middle of a power struggle.

And now he was annoyed at Renard all over again, the urge to punch the captain flaring up inside. Thankfully, Wu distracted him by bringing in Gail Werner. With the case coming together and a suspect in custody, Nick could throw himself into work and didn’t have to think about how much of a power hungry dick Renard was.

That’s not to say he didn’t use the feeling a little longer to send Adalind a warning text that Renard’s mother was asking questions. The last thing they needed was Renard’s mother in town looking for Adalind and the answers she didn’t have.

They had enough problems to deal with, especially when they were woken that night by a frantic Rosalee telling them Monroe was gone.


	16. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be my favourite chapter so far, I really struggled with the right way to address the wesenrein incident and then decided to just not. This chapter marks what could be considered the end of part one.

Necessary Sins – Chapter 15

 

Adalind was asleep when he finally got home. The way she was slumped on the couch with her phone clasped tightly in her hand told him she’d fallen asleep waiting up for him and that she’d likely been sitting there for hours waiting for news. He wondered if she’d been waiting to hear Monroe was safe or worried that something would happen to him?

He wanted to wake her up, reassure her he was fine, that Monroe was fine too but he wasn’t sure the sight of him would be particularly reassuring. He wasn’t covered in blood (not much anyway) but his knuckles were cracked and bleeding, he was sporting a few bruises to the face and neck and he worried that just by looking at him she’d know that something had happened.

Could she see the evidence, a hint of it maybe, that he’d become that stone cold killer again? The one he’d been forced to become when he’d been turned into a zombie Grimm and slaughtered a plane full of Royal supporters and beat up a bar? Adalind had never seen him become that man before and though he’d told her about it he didn’t know that he ever wanted her to have to see it.

But she needed to know it had happened, Adalind needed to know that the reason they weren’t arresting the members of the wesenrein, that they weren’t treating this as a crime and were instead lumping it in with all the other Grimm related messes they never dealt with legally, was because in a fit of cold fury he’d slaughtered all but one of them.

He didn’t really remember much of the fight itself, he supposed he could put that down as a side effect of the state he’d been in. He just knew that eventually Rosalee yelling his name had hammered through the apparent deafness the state created in him and he’d found himself standing in the middle of a mound of broken and bloody bodies while his friends and co-workers (and Juliette) stared at him. He’d taken that angry step toward the young man Hank was restraining before he’d really thought about it and the way the man had flinched back into Hank had left him with a feral look of satisfaction on his face that had Juliette turning away to be violently sick.

‘Dude,’ Monroe had said but he hadn’t seemed to know what else he was supposed to say. Nick supposed his thirst for revenge was satisfied with the destruction Nick had rained down on the wesenrein but that he was also a little concerned by the unnecessary violence.

If they’d been alone Nick might have explained what set him off but he wasn’t going to have that conversation (just yet) in front of Hank or Wu let alone Renard and Juliette so he’d just shrugged and while Rosalee helped Monroe over to his Land Cruiser and checked to make sure Juliette was alright, he, Hank, Wu and Renard (with Bud’s help) set out to bury the bodies.

Even hours later he could still taste the fear – and the fury – that had set him off. It had probably been meant as a last moment of bravado, something said under the assumption that Nick was the kind of Grimm who would kill all wesen (despite the evidence of both Monroe and Bud to the contrary) without hesitation. Nick supposed, in the end, the leader of the wesenrein had been right. He’d just found the right words to motivate Nick into becoming that kind of Grimm.

‘We were thinking of taking your blonde hexenbiest whore next.’

After that Nick didn’t really remember much, it was mostly a blur of punches and kicks, of cries of pain and a blind fury so strong he’d never experienced anything like it before – not remembered it in any case. Monroe and Rosalee had seen him like that once before, they’d both been around when he’d killed people in his duty as a Grimm. They’d helped him kill people before. They might have been surprised by the ferocity of his anger but they weren’t horrified by it. Concerned maybe, worried that he’d never properly be rid of whatever Renard’s half-brother had done to him, but they didn’t shy away from him, they didn’t flinch.

Not like Wu did. Or Hank. Wu was new to the wesen world, Nick understood the way he’d flinched when Nick took an unexpected step toward him and Wu did shrug it all off quickly enough, grabbing a shovel with the rest of them to bury the evidence. He didn’t expect the look Hank had given him, the one that suggested despite all they’d been through together (which included the time Nick tore apart the bar) he’d never seen Nick like that and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

Nick supposed being around Adalind, Monroe and Rosalee, not to mention being a Grimm, had permanently altered the way he viewed right and wrong. Being a Grimm had forever changed the way he dealt with situations and after so many life and death situations, after so many attacks made on him and his family and friends, Nick was almost at ease with killing. There was always a certainty in this kind of situation that said if he didn’t kill he wouldn’t survive.

Maybe that was what it really meant to be a Grimm and a part of the wesen world but Hank was a cop. He’d coped admirably with the changes they’d been forced to make to accommodate the things wesen could do, but he was first and foremost a cop. Nick doubted the knowledge that they could have subdued and arrested the majority of Monroe’s kidnappers sat well with Hank. He doubted Hank was comfortable considering the truth that the wesenrein had never been given the chance because the leader had made that comment and Nick had simply gone ahead and done what was necessary to keep Adalind safe.

He almost wished she’d been there, not because he wanted her anywhere near the wesenrein – they’d actually fought over her desire to help before he had set out on Monroe’s trail – but because afterward, in the car on the drive home, she’d have known what he was feeling, she’d have understood it. If Adalind had been in the car beside him he knew she would have been thinking the same thoughts he was about the necessity of protecting their family. He’d seen Adalind’s ferocious protective streak more than once and he didn’t doubt, were she in his place, that she’d have wreaked just as much havoc.

But Adalind wasn’t there with him, instead he’d been forced to endure Juliette’s company while Budd crammed in beside Rosalee as she tended to Monroe in the backseat using the first aid kit Adalind had retrofitted to suit the needs of a Grimm and a hexenbiest. That had received a raised eyebrow from Rosalee but she hadn’t asked him any questions about the sedative in the pressure syringes or the thick paste in the jar that smelled absolutely terrible but was excellent for sealing wounds.

He’d found it strange that after flinching away from him, after throwing up against the trunk of a tree having witnessed the lengths he’d go to (and how easily he went to them) to – as she saw it – protect his friends, that Juliette was even be willing to get in the car with him. He’d assumed she’d have begged a ride off Hank or Wu and he supposed she might have if they hadn’t been going back to the station with Renard to deal with their one surviving abductor.

And there was a certain level of satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that the one survivor of what would, no doubt, be called a massacre, would spread the word about what happened. He would take what he’d seen and pass the message along to all wesen he came across. He’d tell them what he saw and how it had happened and hopefully he would spread the reason why.

He wanted the stories to be a cautionary tale of what would happen if you threatened Adalind and their son.

He knew he could count on Bud to spread the story. The eisbiber had been the only one close enough to Nick to hear the words that had set him off and they’d had a typically awkward conversation about it while they were cleaning up the last of the evidence that showed the wesenrein had ever been in the woods.

‘You, uh, Nick, you’ve met someone else?’ Bud had asked, looking around nervously as though, despite knowing otherwise, just asking would get him the same treatment as the men they’d just buried.

‘Her name’s Adalind,’ he’d answered simply. ‘She’s a hexenbiest.’

Bud had dropped the ridiculous flags he’d been folding up to stare at Nick in amazement. ‘A hexenbiest? A Grimm and a hexenbiest?!’ Despite his obvious incredulity, Bud had managed to keep his words quiet enough that only Nick could hear them. ‘That’s great, that’s, uh, real great.’

‘I’ve known her for years,’ Nick had found himself telling Bud. ‘She’s pregnant.’

‘She’s – oh, that’s why you, uh, why you…’ Bud trailed off but it hadn’t been difficult to understand what he was getting at.

‘That’s why I went all zombie Grimm and killed them all.’

They hadn’t talked about it after that and Bud had shown remarkable restraint in not bursting out and telling Juliette or talking about it in front of any of the others but Nick had already seen that the near worship Bud had once had for Juliette was tainted by the knowledge that she thought Nick’s life was too dangerous for marriage and kids. Bud had understood perfectly what Nick was saying when he’d explained why he and Juliette had broken up and in that moment, watching as Bud helped shove the last of the evidence into the back of the Land Cruiser, Nick had realised that although it said a lot about Juliette’s opinion of him it also spoke to her opinion of Bud and the other wesen that worked closely with Nick.

What did it say that they were willing to raise a family under the constant threat of violence, discovery and fear?

They’d dropped Bud home first even though Nick would much rather have taken Juliette home first. As satisfying as it was to know that Juliette had suddenly become violently aware of the realities of being a Grimm (which likely served to both confirm her original opinion that being a Grimm was too dangerous and to stop her from trying to win him back any time soon) sitting next to someone who didn’t seem to know whether or not to be afraid of him was not a pleasant experience. Before they dropped Bud home they’d stopped by to see a guy Monroe knew who worked for a funeral home and would (for a small fee) incinerate the evidence of the wesenrein without asking any questions. They’d sent only enough evidence with Hank and Wu to the police station to tie the captured member of the wesenrein to Monroe’s abduction.

Nick didn’t know if the charges would stick but it didn’t much matter. The point was that the wesenrein were unlikely to be taking any more loving couples due to a large percentage of its members meeting an unfortunate end at Nick’s hands and those who hadn’t been present would hopefully hear the story of what he did to their friends and choose to steer well clear of it all.

Juliette didn’t say a word as they all bid Bud a goodnight and didn’t seem to even notice when he started taking the familiar turns toward her house. She hadn’t moved out of the house yet, though she’d told them when Nick asked where he was to take her, that she was mostly packed up and ready to move into an apartment she’d be sharing with Alicia (he managed to hold his tongue over that revelation). The big sign out front that declared the property had been sold didn’t give Nick any of the feelings he might have expected, which he took to mean that Juliette, the house and everything they represented were well and truly behind him.

Juliette hadn’t asked them in, hadn’t offered them anything more than a goodbye when she climbed out of the car and Nick only waited for her to open the front door and get safely inside out of habit more than anything else before he pulled away from the curb. The atmosphere in the car after she left was noticeably lighter and Nick had glanced once into the rear view mirror at his friends before he’d broached the topic of his latest stint as a zombie Grimm.

‘They were planning to take Adalind next, that’s why I killed them all.’

‘Oh,’ Rosalee replied, the single word full of a wealth of understanding and meaning. Some of which he’d likely confirmed with his next words.

‘I couldn’t let that happen.’

‘You’re really serious about her?’ Monroe had seemed mystified, like yes, he and Rosalee had both gotten to see a different side of Adalind at dinner and they’d heard things from Nick that suggested there was a lot more to Adalind than just a weapon Renard or the Royals could wield in their direction, but well, it was Adalind they were talking about.

‘Yeah, I kind of am.’

‘This is a good thing?’ Monroe had wanted to know.

‘We’re happy about it.’

There’d been silence in the car after that, and he’d thought about taking it further, about telling them Adalind was pregnant and that they were expecting a son but he hadn’t. That wasn’t how he wanted to tell them. Truth be told, until that moment, he hadn’t known how he wanted to tell them at all but he’d known he wanted a better moment than with the two of them in his backseat and Monroe beaten and bloody. He wanted a boring moment where they were just being them and not having to worry about injuries or cases, he wanted a quiet moment where he could make the news as exciting and extraordinary as it deserved to be.

He and Adalind were having a baby and he was equal parts terrified and excited by the prospect. He wanted his friends to see that, to know that he was serious not just about Adalind in the here and now but in the future too. He needed them to understand that so that when he told them how far along she was, that this tiny miracle of life they’d created had in fact occurred in the middle of some truly fantastic hate sex (which they would never, ever be telling their son. Ever.) but that it made no difference to how he felt about Adalind or this child. He had to make that clear because if Monroe and Rosalee couldn’t see it then what hope did he have of convincing Hank or even his mother of the truth?

Mind you, he wasn’t all that sure Hank needed to believe him. Yes, it would make working with his partner easier if he understood that he wasn’t with Adalind out of some stupid sense of obligation but it really wasn’t any of Hank’s (or Wu’s or Renard’s and definitely not Juliette’s) business who he chose to sleep with, let alone who he chose to love.

And that was another thing he could have mentioned to Monroe and Rosalee. He could have mentioned that he loved Adalind and that that love had made his fury just that extra bit cold and lethal but he didn’t tell them that either because he rather thought Adalind should be the first one to hear those words and so he’d taken his friends home, happy to see that Adalind had managed to arrange for a new window while they’d been out hunting down Monroe and his kidnappers. He dropped his friends off, told them to call if they needed anything and he’d come home to find Adalind asleep on the couch with her phone clutched tightly in her hand, the expression on her face suggesting that her sleep was far from relaxed but that it was deep.

Juliette had seen the real Nick that night and she’d flinched away from him. Adalind had always known the real Nick and she’d come to trust him, to care for him and was giving him one of the greatest gifts any man could ask for.

He didn’t aim for the bathroom and a refreshing shower first because Adalind wouldn’t care that he was filthy from struggling around in the dirt and leaves. She’d been right there beside him burying the bodies on more than one occasion. She wouldn’t care that he was a mess, she’d be more annoyed at him for not telling her he was okay. That the bruises and the split knuckles were superficial, she’d be able to see for herself, but if he woke her with the sound of the shower she’d be annoyed he hadn’t let her know immediately that he was home safe.

He didn’t want to worry her any more than he already had and he loved that he knew her well enough to know what to expect from each of the scenarios running through his head. Well, as much as you could expect anything where Adalind was concerned. One of the things he loved so much about her was her ability to constantly surprise him. 

He did take his boots off first though, they were filthy and he didn’t want what he had to say to her ruined by an angry rant about the dirty tracks he’d made from the elevator and across her ancient family heirloom of a rug.

Crouched beside her he gently reached out and stroked his hand down the side of her face, using his other to gently pry her phone out of her hand. She didn’t shoot awake like she once might have. His touch was familiar now. Instead, she smiled in her sleep turning into his touch before she frowned and her eyes shot open. They looked him over checking for any obvious signs of injury and when she found none she relaxed.

‘Monroe?’

‘Fine,’ Nick assured her. ‘I think they get how serious I am about you now.’

Adalind struggled into a sitting position so she could get a better look at him and gave him a surprised look. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The leader of the wesenrein told me they were planning to take you next,’ Nick explained. ‘I didn’t take it very well.’

She reached out and took his hands in her own, inspecting his knuckles. ‘You killed them all?’

‘Yeah.’

She nodded. ‘Do you need help getting rid of any evidence?’

He’d already been planning to tell her but this simple question asked without hesitation, without disgust or reproach made him say them sooner and without any nice romantic lead in. ‘I love you,’ and he said them with the grin he only ever used around her.

‘What?’ He wondered if she was surprised by the words or just the fact that he was saying them now.

‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘I love that you’re part of the wesen world, I love that you can look after yourself. I love that you want to fight by my side and that you’ll help me bury the bodies or the evidence, no questions asked.’

‘Oh there’ll be questions,’ she assured him but she was smiling as she said it.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘But they won’t be accusations. You’ll ask me what happened and I’ll tell you because I don’ have to lie to you, I don’t have to pretend that the blood on my hands is from a victim I couldn’t save when it’s from a man I just killed. And you don’t have to lie to me either.

‘I love you Adalind Schade and I wish I’d know all those years ago what we could have when we’re together because this is the kind of future I want.’ He put his hand on her stomach and smiled. ‘I want the wife and the kids and all the craziness and the violence that comes with being a Grimm and I want that with you.’

She released his hands and slid her own up his arms until they were circled around his neck. She was smiling and he thought she might have been crying and it occurred to him that the fact that she’d never been someone’s girlfriend before maybe meant that she’d never had someone tell her they loved her and truly mean it. He was infinitely glad that he could be the first if that were truly the case.

She kissed him, gentle kisses on his cheeks and his nose and across his chin until she reached his lips. ‘I love you too.’

‘Good.’

Her lips curved into an amused grin against his own and he liked the way it felt. The familiarity in the taste and the feel of her and the freedom to know that she would happily strip him down and have her way with him right there on the floor between couch and coffee table, making all kinds of marks on the rug (and on him) even though he was covered in someone else’s blood.

He loved the fact that he knew (from experience) that he was happy to do the same to her but her next kiss ended on a yawn that made him laugh. He didn’t need to have wild sex on that rug right on the heels of his declaration of love, that wasn’t why he’d said it. He didn’t need that physical reminder of what he felt because he only had to look at her, hair knotted on one side where it had been rubbing against the decorative cushion she’d been using as a pillow, clothing rumpled and eyes slightly glazed with sleepiness rather than lust, to know that the love he felt for her was real.

The feelings between them weren’t wrapped up in shiny paper that hid all the ugliness underneath, all the truths and manipulations that they’d had between them in the past. Everything about them was scratched and bruised and slightly dented in places but he knew with a certainty he’d never felt around Juliette that this relationship of theirs was made to last.

It was in the way he helped her out of her clothes and into her pyjamas, in the gentle touches and soft reminders that he was there and that he hadn’t been hurt or anything worse during Monroe’s rescue. It was in the way she was already asleep when he returned clean and grime free from the shower and how she curled into his side as soon as he slid beneath the covers.

It was in the easy way his hand drifted down to trace soft circles over her belly and the kiss he placed on the top of her head where it sat just within reach on his shoulder.

No, he didn’t remember having the certainty with Juliette, not even when he’d been preparing to propose and he was glad for it. He was glad that because it hadn’t been there in his relationship with Juliette that he could see how much more important, how much stronger, his relationship with Adalind was. This crazy relationship between a hexenbiest and a Grimm would stand the test of time, would hold up against the crazy things that life threw at them because they’d stand and face it together.

They’d fight and they’d argue and there would be moments when he wanted to go back to those days where killing her was the acceptable option but he knew they’d never really mean any of it. He was head over heels, one hundred percent in love with Adalind Schade and he wouldn’t give that up for anything.

Of course, knowing it and feeling it was so much easier than trying to explain in writing how he’d gone from hating her to loving her so fiercely to his mother in an email or over coffee with Monroe but he tried.

The next morning while Adalind was in the shower he wrote his mother another email. He started out putting everything he’d been thinking the night before in words, not very clear words mind you, but he thought the lack of eloquence probably spoke more to the truth of the words than if he’d written some flowery bit of poetry that was anything but him.

He scrapped the whole thing two sentences from the end and went with something simpler.

He attached the latest sonogram picture to the email and added the simple words.

Your first grandchild is a boy. I found the one person worth holding on to.

Satisfied that those two quick sentences could tell his mother so much more than any long winded flowery nonsense could, he hit send. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t heard back after his last update, he was used to long stretches of silence from her and now that she had something (someone) incredibly important to protect her check-in’s had been sporadic at best.

‘Bud would like to have us over to dinner,’ Nick informed Adalind when she came into the kitchen in search of something to replace her much missed coffee. Every now and then she would wander around the kitchen trying not to look longingly at the coffee pot before she settled for herbal tea.

‘Bud? The eisbeber with the plumber’s crack?’

Nick snorted into his own mug. ‘That’s how you remember him?’

Adalind shrugged and moved to join him at the table with her tea, a spoon, and a tub of fancy organic yogurt he’d been forced to find on a grocery store trip at four in the morning the week before. ‘I guess it was a memorable first meet and it stuck.’

‘It was my memorable first meet.’

‘For which I am eternally grateful,’ she assured him. ‘It’s going to be hard enough keeping a straight face when I meet him only having heard the story.’

‘I told him about you last night – and about the baby.’

‘Really?’ Nick didn’t blame her for her surprise. ‘I would have thought Monroe would be the person you told first.’

Nick nodded, he’d have assumed the same thing. ‘He was the only one who heard the threat made against you and I wanted him to know how serious I am about you. I think he’s just happy I’ve found someone who wants to have the future with me that he seems to think I deserve.’

‘I think it’s sweet – if a little weird – how invested this guy is in your romantic life.’

‘I think he thought, when we first met, that if I was happy and in a committed relationship then I’d be able to relate to what he has with his wife and kids. I guess he assumed that a Grimm treated with respect who loved like he did wouldn’t want to hurt a man with a family.’

Adalind nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think that says a lot about him. So many other wesen wouldn’t even try to find common ground with a Grimm. And not many eisbiber’s would take a Grimm dating a hexenbiest so well – he does know I’m a hexenbiest right?’

‘Think that was pretty much confirmed by the leader of the wesenrein when he threatened you but I did make sure to repeat it. Bud can get a bit twitchy.’

‘You also said he’s kind of a gossip.’

Nick nodded. ‘He is.’

‘You should go and see Monroe and Rosalee, make sure they hear that I’m pregnant from you and not some random eisbiber neither of us have ever met who wants to spread some gossip while shopping in the Spice Shop.’

‘I want to check up on them anyway,’ Nick replied. ‘Want to come with me?’

Adalind considered it for a moment before ultimately declining his offer. ‘I think you should probably do this on your own. Just let them know I’m glad Monroe’s okay.’

‘You sure?’

Adalind nodded. ‘I don’t think I want to sit through a round of questions and the accusations about timing and your reasons for being with me. I’ve got some work I can do.’

Nick frowned but he didn’t deny there would be questions. ‘Okay. You have that dinner with the Board tonight, right?’

Adalind’s nose wrinkled in a way that Nick found adorable which made him smile. ‘Please don’t remind me. I used to be so good at mingling with the rich and powerful, what happened?’

‘Well you don’t want to manipulate any of these people or sleep with them,’ Nick pointed out quite reasonably. ‘There’s no fun in it for you anymore.’

Adalind gave him a wry look. ‘Thank you for pointing out what I used to do for fun involved a lot of meaningless sex.’

‘Does it count as meaningless if you were doing it for a reason?’ Nick wondered.

Adalind stood from the table and stopped on her way to the kitchen to give him a kiss. That coupled with her next words might have been romantic if he didn’t think she was hoping for a taste of his coffee on his lips. ‘Any sex not with you is meaningless.’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Now who’s the romantic goof?’

‘Still you!’ she assured him.

He was still smiling over their exchange when he arrived on Monroe’s doorstep. Rosalee answered the door with a smile and invited him to join them in the kitchen where Monroe was cooking breakfast. He helped himself to some coffee and surveyed his friend over the rim of his mug. Monroe looked like a walking bruise but his movements weren’t stiff and he seemed to be quite relaxed. Nick could only assume that Rosalee had been feeding him all sorts of things to speed up the healing process and it probably helped to be doing something as normal as cooking breakfast for his wife.

‘How are you feeling?’ Nick asked.

‘Stiff and sore but I’ll live.’

Nick nodded.

‘Did you come over just to check up on me?’ Monroe demanded. ‘Because I’m fine. I’ve had worse.’

‘That does not make me feel better,’ Rosalee growled. ‘You could have been killed.’

‘But I wasn’t and you and Nick were able to find me and everything will be fine. Those guys aren’t exactly in a position to hurt us again.’ He canted his eyes toward Nick in a grateful expression which Nick thought odd given that he was being thanked for killing a bunch of people.

Rosalee made a grumpy noise in the back of her throat but as she was just happy to have Monroe alive and safe at home she didn’t push him on the issue. ‘Did you really just come to check up on Monroe?’

Nick shook his head. He set his mug aside and pulled out his phone, he flicked through until he found the image he was looking for and handed it to Rosalee. ‘I wanted to show you something.’

Curious, Rosalee took the phone from him and moved to stand beside Monroe so they could both get a good look at the photo he was showing them. So that they could both get a nice long look at Adalind’s latest sonogram.

‘Uh, Nick…’

‘Adalind’s pregnant,’ he told them quietly. ‘It’s part of the reason I got so angry when they threatened to take her next.’

Both Monroe and Rosalee seemed unable to come up with the words to describe what they were thinking or feeling. The silence stretched out as Rosalee stared blankly at the image on Nick’s phone and Monroe alternated between looking at the picture, looking at Nick and looking around the kitchen as though desperately hoping to find the words to say written helpfully on the kitchen cabinets.

Eventually, Rosalee drew her eyes away from the picture to give him a strange look. ‘Congratulations.’

She seemed to be looking for something in his expression but he had no idea what. ‘Thanks,’ he smiled. ‘It’s a boy.’

‘You’re having a baby,’ Monroe said. ‘A boy. With Adalind. Adalind Schade. A baby boy with Adalind.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re happy about this?’

‘Excited,’ Nick confirmed. ‘And terrified.’

‘Well, uh, congratulations man,’ Monroe ventured. ‘A baby, I mean wow.’

‘I know,’ Nick agreed.

‘This didn’t just happen,’ Rosalee hazarded. ‘This isn’t you having just found out.’ She still had his phone in her hand and she waved it about as though to confirm what she was asking.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve known for a while.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Rosalee wanted to know. She didn’t sound hurt, she just sounded curious.

‘I didn’t want you thinking I was only with her for the baby. She deserves better than that.’

To his surprise, Rosalee scoffed. ‘Oh Nick,’ she huffed. ‘You’re so in love with that woman no one could possibly make that mistake.’

Monroe didn’t seem surprised by his wife’s words, not like Nick was, he just nodded his own agreement with her assessment. ‘You really are, buddy.’

Bemused, Nick stood back and watched Monroe finish making breakfast while Rosalee told him all of the little things she’d witnessed at their dinner (not to mention the previous night rescuing Monroe and the million other little things he did and said while talking about Adalind) that told her how much he cared for his ex-nemesis turned baby-mama.

He really wished Adalind had come with him, she deserved to hear the words and the sentiment behind them from Rosalee herself. Whether she’d thought it possible or not, it seemed like Adalind had well and truly won Rosalee over and whether or not she knew it yet, she’d found herself a good friend in the fuchsbau.

Nick had already known that for himself.


	17. Interlude 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Adalind, it began with a series of small touches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we reached the end of part one, this seemed like a fitting place to put this chapter. There’s no annoying cliff-hanger and no desperate need to make sure someone’s not dead.

Necessary Sins – Interlude 1  
Adalind  
Small Touches

 

For Adalind, it started with the gentlest of touches…

She was trying to decide between cereal for dinner or going out and spending a little extra cash on something more substantial when the door of the motel room (the latest equally crappy one) crashed open. Her reflexive woge and the way she gnashed her teeth at the intruder didn’t give the hulking figure pause. She had a moment to register the man breaking through the flimsy lock on the door was in fact a hundjager and not likely to be scared by a little hexenbiest woge, before he was bearing down on her with a tyre iron.

A freaking tyre iron.

Her hand came up, power shoving the blow aside with enough force to jerk the hundjager back slightly but it didn’t stop him from lashing out in other ways. He tried to kick her and she dodged, trying to get around him and out the door. He didn’t seem particularly worried by her powers and he merely shook off her next attempt to shove him back, reaching out with an ease that surprised her to grab her hair. He tugged and the pain of it made her eyes water. She went with the tug, easier than losing her hair and when she was close enough she elbowed him in the stomach.

She succeeded in knocking the breath out of him but little else. He didn’t release her hair, merely doubled over slightly using the hand still clutching the tyre iron to grip his stomach – like that would somehow help him catch his breath.

She tried to spin around in his grip, praying she wasn’t about to help him pull out more of her hair and made a grab for the burner phone she knew she was going to have to replace after this. She missed on the first try and the hundjager landed a painful blow against her side with the tyre iron. She went down to her knees, falling thankfully closer to the table and her phone, her hair finally coming free of his grip. She snatched up the phone and rolled deftly to the side, missing the next swing that was aimed at her head. She didn’t miss the one that came after that which got her in the back.

She cried out, fingers struggling desperately to work the phone. This one had no numbers in it, it wasn’t like she had any friends or family to call, but there was one number she’d memorised just two weeks before, one she’d only hoped to use to learn about her daughter.

Another blow hit her side and she crashed sideways into the table. Before the hundjager could land another strike she was on her front and wriggling away. She kicked out, knocking the chair free and into his path but it hardly slowed him down. She pushed up onto her hands and knees, one hand still desperately trying to get the numbers in and finally just as another blow came sailing toward her she hit the call button, flipped around onto her back and lashed out with both feet and her power. The hundjager soared away from her and landed atop the little kitchenette. Cheap plastic cups and plates tumbled to the floor and she scrambled backward as fast as she could, desperate to put some distance between them.

‘Hello?’

The sound of Nick’s voice, thick with sleep startled her but she quickly snatched the phone up to her ear. ‘Nick! Nick, its Adalind, I need help. Please, I -’

She’d momentarily taken her attention off the hundjager and his next blow hit the side of her head. Stars burst in her vision, lights flashing and blinking and she thought she must have cried out but she couldn’t be sure. She thought she could hear Nick still but his voice was muffled. She didn’t know if that was distance or if the phone had fallen under something.

‘Nick! Help!’ she rattled off the name of the motel and her room number, woged again and launched herself in the direction of the hundjager, still half blinded by the pain in the side of her head.

She got in a few good blows, she knew she did, but the pain in her head wasn’t easing and her balance was shot to hell, concentration impossible. She thought she must have broken a few of his bones but it felt like he’d broken a few of hers as well.

She didn’t know how long it would take Nick to come, didn’t even know if he would come, but after everything she’d been through there was no well in hell she was letting some bastard hundjager kill her.

As far as last thoughts go, it wasn’t a bad one, and later as hard as she tried she never quite remembered what happened after that, not until the feeling of being lifted by a pair of strong arms and even that she was pretty sure was just her imagination filling in the blanks. She knew Nick must have carried her from the room but she didn’t know if she was remembering it or had just constructed something based on what he’d told her later.

The first clear memory she really had was of waking up in the emergency room, lying on a bed. For some reason her hand had been gripping Nick’s arm so tightly he was probably going to have nail marks for days, Grimm healing or not.

‘Hey,’ he’d greeted her, his voice gentle in a way she’d never heard before. ‘You with me?’

It took her a moment to focus on his face without the world spinning but when she succeeded she made the mistake of nodding her head. Well she tried to nod her head, the pain was excruciating and then she was pretty sure she vomited.

Everything that happened the next time she could open her eyes was nicely solid, didn’t spin and thankfully, didn’t involve anyone trying to hurt her. It did involve some pretty decent painkillers though she didn’t dare try to move her head again.

‘You needed stitches,’ Nick informed her, when it became clear her focus was on just one of him and not multiple Nick’s. He reached out and brushed some of her hair away from her forehead. His touch was amazingly gentle, fingers ghosting over her skin so softly she didn’t even feel them. Which she realised moments later was because there was a nice crisp white bandage stuck to her head and the local anaesthetic was keeping everything nicely numbed.

She’d felt his fingers ghosting through her hair though and remembered how nice it felt to be touched without threat or malice. She wasn’t even sure it mattered that it was Nick who was touching her, just that for the first time in weeks someone was touching her with something other than anger and rage.

‘Thank you.’

The look Nick gave her in response said he wasn’t quite sure he’d made the right choice but that didn’t change how she felt. She’d memorised other numbers in her life, other people she could have called but when it had come right down to it, when her life had been on the line, there’d really only been the one person she could call.

A hexenbiest calling a Grimm for help. At the time, she’d remembered being amused by the very idea, later she’d realise it was a sign that things had already begun changing.

A playful shove…

‘Don’t you dare!’

‘What?’

‘I can see you thinking about it and I am telling you, if you want to live, you will absolutely not do what you’re thinking about doing.’

She tried to glare at him, tried to look intimidating but it lacked conviction. It was really hard to be convincingly vengeful when he knew she wasn’t likely to kill or maim him. Why couldn’t they go back to that? Things were so much simpler when the only time she was thinking about Nick was when she was planning the best way to kill him or ruin him. She’d been pretty good at it too, he’d been extremely prepared and exceptionally willing to kill her after that teeny tiny incident involving her cat scratching Juliette.

Things were so much simpler back then. Back before they’d started this, whatever the hell it was because she refused to call it a friendship, she’d have easily pushed him over the side of a cliff and not thought another second about him.

Yesterday she’d caught a trailer for a new film that she kind of wanted to see and she’d been most of the way to calling him to see if he’d take her before she’d tossed her phone aside in disgust. The phone he’d bought her in the loft he was letting her use.

Maybe she should just save them all the trouble and kill him right now.

Killing him was better than admitting she liked him. It was certainly better than acknowledging that he liked her too, that they were both horribly aware of this fact and that she wasn’t even really mad at him anymore about stealing Diana away (well most of the time).

Jesus, why couldn’t she hate him anymore? They were trudging through the forest (again) burying the body of – of all things – an eisbiber (seriously an eisbiber assassin, it was just wrong on so many levels) and it was wet and dirty and it looked like it was going to rain again and she’d really wanted to just shove Nick in the grave and bury him too only she hadn’t.

Because she liked him.

She may have joked about it that night he took her to the trailer for the first time and it might be a shovel she was holding this time and not a reaper scythe, but she was seriously considering whether or not a good smack with the flat of the shovel blade to the side of his head and then a quick stabbing to sever his head wouldn’t be the smarter move.

Especially when he had that look on his face that said he was seriously thinking about doing it.

She had to kill him, it was the only way they could get free of this crazy friendship, this weird affection she was developing for him. They were supposed to be mortal enemies, not friends, not the kind of people who had in-jokes, who could read what the other was thinking just off a look. And okay that last one could be considered the result of all of the time they spent trying to kill each other, you have to have a reasonable ability to guess what your enemy is doing to stay one step ahead of them, but that was pushing things.

That was bordering on denial and Adalind had always prided herself on being self-aware.

And he was still thinking about it.

‘Stop it!’

He laughed and it was such a carefree sound, not at all tainted by the strain he’d been feeling earlier, that for a moment she seriously considered letting him do it just so that he’d stay this happy and light for a little longer. There was no Juliette drama weighing on him at this moment, he was just Nick, just her Grimm.

‘Ugh, why do I even like you?’ They were at the car now and she waited for Nick to open the back so they could place the shovel, flashlights and the assorted weapons they had on them inside.

Her question didn’t sour Nick’s mood like she’d hoped it would, usually mentioning how they’d developed an honest-to-god friend thing brought him down a peg or two. This time he remained offensively cheerful and she knew he was still thinking about it.

‘I’m going to have to kill you,’ she informed him. ‘It’s my only option.’

He laughed again and gave her a good-natured shoved in the direction of the passenger seat. She let the motion move her without thought. The light nudge so familiar that it didn’t actually occur to her until she was buckling up her seatbelt that the gesture was familiar. That she and Nick had gotten so comfortable around each other that a shove, a hand on the small of her back, a touch of her hand on his arm didn’t even rate a mention.

At the time it was an alarming realisation, later it was just another step toward something new, something different. Something so much better.

A little platonic ass fondling…

There were a lot of things she should have been thinking about, the mountain of a wesen bearing down on them, the fact that her wrist hurt or the horrible twist in her stomach that she could absolutely deny a little longer because they were in a tunnel that smelt absolutely rank so of course she was going to feel sick and a little dizzy. It wasn’t exactly easy to scramble up a ladder with what definitely felt like a sprained wrist and the stench of overripe garbage filling her possibly overly sensitive nose.

But she wasn’t actually thinking about those things because Nick was below her giving her a boost and he was doing so by using the hand free of the crossbow to push on her jean clad ass.

She hadn’t seen any action of the fun sex kind since the morning when she’d tried to steal his powers and then had to give them back to him. It was a dry spell that hadn’t particularly bothered her until right this moment with her heart pounding in her chest, adrenalin pumping through her veins and Nick’s really warm hand cupping her butt.

Seriously, he was pushing against her ass in the hopes that she’d get up the ladder just a little bit faster but her brain was swinging in a totally different direction and in that direction they weren’t being chased by the biggest wesen she’d ever seen, there was absolutely not the stench of garbage and her jeans weren’t in a position to shield the heat of Nick’s hand from her bare flesh. Probably because where her mind was right in that moment they’d been tossed carelessly aside to drape tellingly off a lamp. Which was weird because she didn’t even have a lamp.

Yeah, that was what was weird about that whole scenario.

Jesus, what the hell was wrong with her? They were in the middle of running for their lives, had in fact progressed to making it up the ladder (both of them, though Nick still gave her the occasional shove when it looked like she was losing her balance or her grip – and good god was this not the longest ladder in the world?) and she was thinking about how nice it would feel if he could caress her bare ass with his hands.

But hey, turned out she was excellent at multitasking because she and Nick got the hell up that ladder and away from the humongous wesen chasing them while she played out a scenario that wouldn’t be out of place in a low budget porno in her head.

At the time she was horrified, maybe slightly disgusted (mostly turned on) but later she’d realise it was kind of inevitable.

The squeezing of a hand…

She felt like absolute crap. In more ways than one. She could be honest with herself, being pregnant was only part of the problem, if it was really a problem at all. Because really, being pregnant again wasn’t the problem so much as the fact that she had no idea how to tell Nick he was going to be a father, Juliette was in the picture in a way that said if she told Nick about the baby he’d probably use it as an excuse to leave his long-time girlfriend and she was so ridiculously attracted to him that it tended to eclipse pretty much everything else that was going on in her day.

And it really didn’t help that he’d stopped shaving so much and cut his hair. She knew it wasn’t intentional but he was only looking more and more attractive to her and she had no idea if that was just her hormones talking.

Okay, no, that was a lie, it wasn’t the hormones. Well not the pregnancy ones at least, she was pretty sure regular old hormones were to blame for the fantasies she kept having that involved him. She would absolutely blame the baby hormones for the ones where sex wasn’t a factor and they were acting out domestic scenes of wedded bliss. She’d never in her life had those kind of fantasies, not for any length of time anyway (Sean did not count – he was an ass who was just using her, so he absolutely did not factor in here).

And it really didn’t help that the chasm between Nick and Juliette was widening, the tipping point being that Nick wanted a wife and kids – a family – and Juliette was too afraid to have one with him. Adalind really didn’t think presenting Nick with a positive pregnancy test and announcing she’d like to marry him was quite the answer to his relationship problems he was looking for.

That didn’t mean the idea was unappealing. Well, maybe not the whole marriage thing. Just because she didn’t want to kill him anymore and spent a lot of her time fantasising about tearing his clothes off didn’t mean she actually liked him enough to want to marry him. Let’s not get carried away. It was just that she could quite literally hand Nick everything he wanted at the moment and the thought made her heart lurch and her stomach twist.

She could give him what he wanted but would he want it for the right reasons? She didn’t know what was going on between them, not really, not beyond friendship, but she didn’t want to ruin what they had by announcing she could give him the child he wanted when it wasn’t with the woman he wanted. She liked what they had too much to ruin it.

Because it would ruin it, how could it possibly go any other way? She knew the kind of man Nick was, had come to like and rely on it but she couldn’t handle the thought that one stupid mistake on her part would ruin their new relationship in ways they could never come back from.

She wanted to cry. She didn’t know what she wanted from Nick, not really, it was all just too much but she knew she didn’t want to be the woman who was only really in his life because of a stupid tryst neither of them had wanted in the first place. She wanted him to like her for her, not for the baby she was giving him.

Soft heat and warm fingers covering her own in her lap ripped her away from her thoughts. Nick squeezed her hand gently, looking across at her from the driver’s seat with concern. ‘You okay?’

‘I don’t know,’ she told him in a whisper. He didn’t ask her anymore questions, didn’t push her and that made her want to cry even more. He just held her hand, let her cling to it as she worked through her thoughts and got herself under control.

There was no ignoring the feelings this touch stirred, no more denying the feel of his hand on hers or the fact that when she turned her own around and laced her fingers through his he made no move to pull away. Driving through the darkened streets home from a dinner that had felt like a date in more ways than one, Adalind put all the tiny pieces, all the small touches together and knew that as many excuses as she could make, she wanted Nick.

But she wanted him to want her too and so she held his hand in the dark and tried not to let him see her cry.

Because he held on and didn’t let go…

She honestly hadn’t meant anything by inviting him to share her bed. They were familiar with each other now, hell, they’d already seen each other naked and so when he came to the loft declaring that he and Juliette had broken up (she didn’t believe him at first) all she’d been thinking was that he’d had a rough night and the couch was the least comfortable place to get a good night’s rest.

She’d been disappointed when he’d taken the couch but she’d woken in his arms and though she’d slipped out of bed before he’d woken to find them snuggled up, the fact that he’d given up on the couch made her smirk.

But that had only been the first night. He hadn’t even pretended he was taking the couch after that first night and she wasn’t about to kick him out of bed. Some nights they barely touched, others they draped over each other, tangled limbs and her hair draped over him, sometimes he woke first, sometimes, like that first morning, she did. On the mornings when he woke first he didn’t flinch away from her, there was no attempt to stealthily disentangle limbs, no attempt to pretend they hadn’t moved in their sleep.

She didn’t know what it meant to him, wasn’t even sure she knew how she felt about it, but she loved the fact that he never flinched away, he never hid from her and on mornings when neither of them had to be anywhere and it was cold and wet out it was easy to just drift between waking and sleep in the warmth of the covers and his arms and not think too hard on what it meant or what she wanted from him.

More terrifyingly, she didn’t’ have to think about what it meant to Nick.

Because this wasn’t something she could hide from anymore and all the little things were starting to add up in her mind, starting to add up to something she wasn’t quite ready to name.

And his hands on her skin were warm and sure…

It was just another one of those things they’d started doing and though she couldn’t have said how it started or which of them had done it first, Nick texting her to let her know he’d be home a little late because he was having a beer with Monroe was just a thing they did now. She didn’t think anything of it and she had a fair bit of work to be doing and the extra hour or so without Nick distracting her could be put to good use.

In fact, she’d almost gotten through all of it when he came home. ‘Hey, how was Monroe?’

She had no idea what it was, whether she’d moved a little differently or smiled at him a certain way but his response wasn’t verbal. He just walked right up to her, took her face in his hands and kissed her.

She might have melted a little. She thought she might have managed to hold something of a coherent conversation (had she really been so obvious?) but things were being said (couple!), feelings were being revealed and Nick – Nick Burkhardt, Grimm, cop, baby daddy – wanted her as much as she wanted him and so how could she possibly have done anything other than hold out her hand and lead him to bed?

But in the end, the most important touch was something small and insignificant but it meant the world…

She was running a little late, she knew that, knew that any minute now Nick would be knocking on her office door telling her it was time to go if they actually wanted to be on time for the appointment and make it fit in her lunch break and before he caught a case that took up all of his time.

Did that sound bitter? She hadn’t meant it to sound bitter but she’d had a headache all day, nothing tasted nice and everything she’d forced herself to eat was just sitting in her stomach churning away as though waiting for the slightest provocation to come hurtling back up. Probably at an embarrassing moment when she’d have to reach for a convenient waste paper basket instead of a handy bathroom stall. Wanting to spend a few extra minutes with Nick where he could make her feel better wasn’t all that much to ask.

So of course, just as she was thinking that she really just needed him, her phone chimed and it turned out he’d caught a triple homicide and wouldn’t be able to go with her to her doctor’s appointment.

She wasn’t going to cry, she was Adalind Schade and she was absolutely not going to cry over the fact that her boyfriend was a cop and was (rightfully) putting the murder of three people before another standard check-up with her OB/GYN. He could see the new photos of their son when he got home. She’d put them on the fridge for him, maybe leave them on his nightstand if it was looking to be really late when he got home.

And she could tell herself that all she wanted but her head hurt and she’d just really wanted to see Nick and now she was going to have to drive herself to this stupid appointment that wasn’t stupid at all because she loved every opportunity to see their son and how he was growing and developing but seriously, her head was pounding and Nick wasn’t there.

She was absolutely not going to cry.

‘Hey.’

Startled, Adalind looked up from her desk to find Rosalee standing in her doorway with a smile and a small brown paper bag clutched in her hand. They’d spent a bit of time together since the first dinner, little things when Nick was involved in some wesen case that required actual wesen assistance and a few more meals together but there’d always been someone else there as a buffer – mostly Nick.

‘Rosalee, hi.’

Rosalee held up the bag. ‘Nick thought you might want some company for your appointment and that you might need something for your head.’

The sheer unexpectedness of it all tipped Adalind over the edge and she burst into tears. She’d mentioned how badly her head was starting to throb in passing as they’d both been leaving that morning and although she hadn’t mentioned it since, Adalind could only assume that the tone of her text messages throughout the day had told him how bad it had gotten and he’d known how much she didn’t like going to these appointments on her own – it was too much like her pregnancy with Diana when she was scared and alone. He’d sent along Rosalee in his place, someone who could provide her with support and herbal remedies to fix her head. And probably the nausea as well.

‘Oh honey,’ Rosalee murmured, crossing the office quickly to her side to pull her into a hug, which (annoyingly) made Adalind cry harder.

She’d done a lot of bad things to these people and yet somehow Nick loved her. In Nick she’d found not only the family she’d always wanted but friends she could trust and rely on to have her back. He’d given her the world and proven it in one simple gesture.

She wasn’t sure she could ever give him as much as he’d given her but she would try. She’d spend the rest of their lives showing him just how much she loved him, how much he and their friends meant to her. And he’d let her, she knew he would, because he loved her and he wanted her to be happy and he’d show her in return all the ways she’d given him the family he’d always wanted.

‘I love that stupid jerk,’ she told Rosalee through her tears.

‘Yes,’ Rosalee laughed softly. ‘He loves you too.’ She pulled away and gave Adalind time to put herself back together.

‘Sorry,’ Adalind apologised, though Rosalee waved it off as unnecessary. ‘It all just hit me at once.’

‘Come on, I’ll take you to your appointment and then we’ll have some tea.’

‘I don’t have long,’ Adalind apologised.

‘Actually, you’re mine for the whole afternoon,’ Rosalee informed her. ‘I’m not the only one Nick called. If the tea helps your head then we’ll go shopping for baby things, if not, well, maybe we’ll just treat ourselves to facials, maybe even a massage.’

‘You don’t have to spend the whole afternoon with me,’ Adalind put forth, offering Rosalee a way out.

‘Of course I don’t have to,’ Rosalee replied. ‘Adalind I want to.’

‘Why?’

‘I like you,’ she replied simply. ‘And even if I didn’t, you make Nick happy and that alone makes you worth getting to know.’

Adalind was touched by the sentiment behind Rosalee’s words, by Nick’s actions and his thoughtfulness. The thought that Nick would organise something like this for her just because he had to miss and appointment was a surprise but not outside the realm of possibility, he’d proven to her time and time again that he really was just a romantic goof. Rosalee however had no real reason to go out of her way to help Adalind and that was why the gesture meant so much.

It was hard to imagine how all of this could have come from a single phone call in her time of need.

And it was the phone call. At least that’s what they would tell their son. There was no need to go throwing the words “hate sex” around. Nope, no call for that at all.


	18. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a new case, new mystery and a new direction away from season 4 - sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter marks the beginning of the big changes I'm making to season 4 (yes, bigger than I've already made). Thanks for the kudos!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 16

 

As far as they could tell – they being the medical examiner and her assistant – the body was that of a woman somewhere between forty-five and sixty years old. Her hair was starting to grey and she’d had her nails done shortly before her death. She had all her teeth and so they had to hope they could use those to identify her through dental records. A photo was going to be out of the question and fingerprints would be tough unless the lab went to the effort of rehydrating her fingers. All that was left of the woman was a dried and leathery corpse, dead more than six months was all they could get without more tests but the ME was happy to give them that much based on the conditions the body had been found in.

Nick looked around the room, shining the beam of his flashlight into the edges of the room that weren’t being illuminated by the portable lights CSU had set up. It was a strange room, though not the strangest he’d seen. He had a lot of strange to compare to these days and the discovery of a secret room by a property developer and his head of construction, while strange, wasn’t even the oddest thing he’d seen all week. He supposed at one stage it had been a small bedroom or an office before the doorway had been conceal by a false wall and forgotten as the years went by. As it was now, it seemed to be a library and a lab – strangely free of dust and cobwebs, like it had been perfectly sealed before they’d broken through the wall.

Actually, judging by the mummified looking corpse, it probably had been sealed up pretty tight trapping the woman in with the oddest assortment of books Nick would have expected in a hidden library. The very nature of the room suggested (to his Grimm mind) that the books would have been mysterious wesen tomes or (to the cynical detective who’d been working robbery/homicide for years) rare and valuable texts.

The books were neither. According to the titles on their spines, they were old cookbooks, family bibles and an assortment of paperbacks and bestsellers in hardback. By all appearances it was a perfectly ordinary library, no reason to hide it. The lab side of things looked like nothing more than a little kitchenette, they were only calling it a lab because it was filled with so many small glass jars filled with herbs and spices. Still, with all of the weirdness Nick got to see on a regular basis, uncovering a mysterious library and spice cupboard wouldn’t have been enough to draw his curiosity beyond finding the woman’s identity and giving her family some closure if it weren’t for the fact that on the wall above a low wooden desk was the circle Fuentes had drawn all those months ago. The ring that, according to Adalind, was meant to call on the aid of Grimms.

Really, it was only the fact that Adalind had spent so long puzzling over the inconsistencies of that case that gave him the knowledge to recognise that the symbols painted in the circle on the wall were the real thing, not the corrupted version Fuentes had reproduced. There were no mistakes in this version and it looked a lot older than a few months. If he had to guess, Nick would have said the circle pre-dated the woman’s death by years. But that was just his instincts talking. Until they identified the woman, there wasn’t much chance they would get answers. The mark did make him think that even if her killer hadn’t been, she was wesen.

And she’d definitely been murdered; the back of her skull had been smashed in with considerable force and though the blood had long since dried, the faded and dried blood spatter suggested her attacker had come up behind her (through the open secret door), smashed her over the back of the head just once with serious force and then she’d simple fallen onto her face. The height and angle of the spatter suggested she’d been on her knees when she’d been hit and she’d tumbled forward from the force of the blow and come to rest on her front, face pressed into the cold stone floor and her arms limp by her side. The blow appeared to have knocked her out instantly even if it hadn’t killed her because it didn’t look like she’d had time to struggle. She’d simply fallen where she’d knelt, it was possible she hadn’t even felt the blow, if the blow was as hard and as unexpected as it seemed to have been.

‘I’m guessing that circle thing is wesen related,’ Wu said, sidling up to Nick with his notebook in hand.

Nick nodded. ‘Knowing it was wesen doesn’t make sense of it, though,’ Nick assured him, he wanted Wu to know that not being aware of the true nature of the case wasn’t a hindrance in this case. The damn circle was still as much of a mystery as ever. ‘Adalind thinks the one that Fuentes was drawing was wrong, that he’d made mistakes.’

Wu scrutinised the marks on the wall, the circle with its inscription around the outside and the prayers going out in the four directions. ‘Is this one different?’ he asked, but before Nick could answer Wu had turned a smug grin on him. ‘Who’s Adalind?’

‘The girlfriend Hank doesn’t seem to want to know anything about,’ Nick replied with an edge. It had become more and more obvious over the last month that Hank was deliberately ignoring any and all attempts Nick made to bring Adalind up in conversation. It wasn’t even as though his partner knew it was Adalind, Nick could have understood his complete reluctance to hear anything about his relationship if Hank knew the identify of his new (serious) girlfriend. But he didn’t and so Nick was having a lot of trouble understanding why Hank seemed to change the subject or find somewhere else to be whenever the topic of Adalind came up.

Wu had noticed Hank’s odd behaviour just as Nick had because it didn’t just extend to Adalind, it seemed to cover all things relating to his mother and Diana as well as certain things about Monroe and Rosalee and the complete refusal to even mention Trubel’s name nowadays. They’d all tried asking him about it, calling him out on the weird behaviour but so far Hank had managed to avoid having to give any kind of explanation. It didn’t sit well with any of them and Nick was considering the wisdom of taking it up with Renard.

Which really went a long way to showing how concerned they were all getting about Hank. His avoidance of Renard had kicked up several notches in the last few weeks simply because he’d had less and less reason to speak to the man as the wesen related cases he’d caught had thankfully been relatively simple. No one had gotten badly maimed and there hadn’t been any need to cover up strange occurrences. The paperwork actually made sense which wasn’t something Nick could often say. More often than not they had to rely on the fact that Renard was the one who signed off on their cases to get by.

It helped that the strange quiet from the wesen community had come with a respite in the attacks from the Royal families on he and Adalind. Aware though they both were that any lapse in assassination attempts likely meant something big and nasty was brewing, they were happy to take the break while they could. It was nice just being Nick and Adalind and having dinner with Monroe and Rosalee. Being normal Nick and Adalind meant limited Renard time, no need to switch grocery stores again and a chance for Adalind to properly bond with Rosalee. If the friendship they made had time to blossom purely because something worse was on its way, then Nick was still okay with it because if something big and bad was coming then Adalind deserved (and needed) the friendship of both Rosalee and Monroe to balance out the bad that would come with that.

Of course, because there was weirdness with Hank and growing closeness between Adalind and Rosalee it seemed as though it had fallen on Wu to provide both the uncomfortably pervasive questions about his love life that Hank would have once provided and the crushing wit and sarcasm that Monroe could no longer apply because, despite his expectations, he’d come to genuinely like Adalind. Nick liked to remind Monroe of this when he was feeling particularly amused by his friends complete and utter turn around where the hexenbiest was concerned.

‘Adalind,’ Wu repeated thoughtfully. ‘Why do I know that name?’

‘Probably because I arrested her once – or twice.’

Wu snorted. ‘Strangely unsurprised,’ he cracked. ‘Least you only arrested her.’

Nick grinned. ‘Oh, I tried to kill her a few times too.’

Wu snapped his fingers in sudden recognition. ‘Hexenbiest,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘There’s an entry on her in the book in the trailer.’

‘You saw that?’ Nick rolled his eyes.

Wu nodded, amused. ‘The addition to that entry makes so much more sense now.’

‘She seemed to think it was amusing,’ Nick agreed.

‘So she knows about this,’ Wu asked, directing the conversation back to the case at hand.

‘She’s kind of a nerd,’ Nick explained in a tone that did nothing to hide how sexy he found that, it earned him an amused look from Wu that might have turned into a witty remark had he not continued saying, ‘She finds this sort of thing interesting. She spent ages researching this when we were dealing with Fuentes but everything she turned up said he was drawing it wrong.’

‘So you know what it means?’

‘If this is the real one without mistakes then it’s a call to Grimms for help, almost like a prayer.’ Nick looked over the words uncomfortably. ‘Apparently some wesen used to worship Grimms.’

‘Kind of like worshipping Death isn’t it?’ Wu mused. ‘Can’t have made them very popular.’

‘Mostly I think it got them killed.’

‘By other wesen or the Grimms they were asking for help?’

‘Probably both.’ Nick looked around the room again but nothing jumped out at him so he asked Wu if the developer or his contractor knew anything that might help them.

‘I got the name of the company that owned the building before this – Weldon & Howe – as far as Mr Joseph knows they purchased it for tax purposes and never did anything with it until they went under and it was a private residence before that.’

They both took a moment then to consider the sheer scale of the building, Nick couldn’t imagine living in such an enormous house. Just thinking about cleaning it or trying to keep track of a toddler in it made him think fondly of their tiny loft.

Wu continued, ‘The contractor, Abigail Smythe, says that her boys have been tromping all over this building checking what work needs to be done for weeks but this is the first anyone knew about a secret room.’

‘When did they start work?’

‘Three weeks ago,’ Wu replied. ‘Joseph purchased the building – house? Mansion?’

‘Manor?’ Nick suggested.

Wu shrugged, ‘Joseph purchased it four months ago but it took a while for the work permits to come through. He did say he’s been through here a dozen or more times with the council planner and an architect but the original plans of the building lodged with the city don’t show any secret room.

‘ME says he’ll have a better idea of time of death by the end of the day, then maybe we can start putting together a timeline.’

As it was now, they’d have to run the basics through missing persons and do a check on the owners of the building but they wouldn’t really know what they were looking for until they had a timeframe or a name to work with. Still, the mark on the wall gave him something else to work with so he took a photo of it and sent it to Adalind and another of the jars and lab to both her and Rosalee in the hopes that one of them could give him some kind of an explanation.

He hadn’t even had a chance to put his phone back in his pocket when it started ringing and the photo he’d taken of Adalind excitedly explaining some esoteric Ancient Greek ritual popped up on his screen. In the picture she was smiling, hands waving about with enthusiasm, you couldn’t tell she was talking about ritual murder.

‘Hey,’ he greeted, smile gracing his lips which made Wu smirk at him like he now had a wealth of material to use against him later. Knowing how stupid Adalind made him, Nick figured Wu problem could get some useful material from just a dopey smile.

‘Where are you?’ she demanded, sounding far more excited than he’d expected.

‘At a crime scene with Wu,’ he answered.

‘Obviously,’ she huffed impatiently. ‘I meant give me the address, I’m ditching work and coming to you.’

‘What?’ Nick was surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Close your left eye, turn so you’re left side is facing that bookcase to the left of the mark and look at the shelves with your right eye.’

‘What?’ This time he sounded incredulous.

‘Seriously,’ she told him. ‘You’ll thank me later.’

Feeling like an idiot he did as he was told, shooting Wu a confused look as he moved into position and did as he was told. It was incredibly hard trying to look through his own nose at the books on the shelf but he managed with a great deal of difficulty to get a somewhat blurry look at the shelves. He had to do it three times with Wu’s increasing amusement providing background before he believed what he was seeing.

When he did as Adalind instructed, the books looked completely different. There was no longer a random assortment of cookbooks, bibles and paperbacks, instead the shelves, the ones he could see anyway were stacked with old leather volumes with peeling letters and titles in several different languages, none of which Nick could read but he could recognise a few as being German and Latin.

Impressed, he put his phone back up to his ear and gave Adalind and impressed, ‘What am I looking at?’

‘It’s a hexenbiest library,’ she informed him with enthusiasm. ‘I want those books.’

‘Adalind you can’t just take them.’

‘Address,’ she demanded, completely ignoring his reasonable words. He gave her the address, was told she’d been there in thirty minutes and that she’d be bringing Rosalee and then she hung up on him.

‘What just happened?’ Wu asked.

‘Has the ME left with the body already?’

Wu nodded. ‘Left and hour ago. Why?’

‘Because I’d bet the woman has the mark of a hexenbiest on her tongue.’

Wu’s eyebrows shot up and Nick directed him to stand where he’d been standing and to close his left eye and get a look at the bookshelves through his right eye. Wu took the same three attempts before he truly understood what he was seeing and when he did his only comment had nothing to do with surprise but rather with Adalind. It was also more serious than Nick would have expected given the light nature of their earlier conversation.

‘You’re serious about her?’ he asked. ‘Is she the reason you broke up with Juliette?’

Nick was surprised Wu would ask. They’d known each other for years but it was only recently, now that Wu knew about wesen, that they’d become proper friends. Wu had always been on the periphery of his life and Nick hadn’t realised how much the man probably knew and saw about his relationship with Juliette. It had been so easy to forget while trying to hide the truth from Wu that the man still saw a lot and that wasn’t limited to the wesen craziness.

‘No,’ Nick answered truthfully. ‘And yes. Juliette wanted a family but she didn’t want one with a Grimm. Adalind was the first wesen I ever saw, she’s always known me as the Grimm and it doesn’t bother her. I like that about her,’ he added. ‘Guess a hexenbiest is a good match for a Grimm.’

‘Because you’ve tried to kill each other?’ Now Wu sounded amused again.

‘She certainly gives as good as she gets.’

‘I’m not even sure you’re talking about fighting her anymore.’

‘Maybe I’m not,’ Nick admitted with a laugh.

They started exploring the shelves again, this time they carefully took photos of each shelf, making a catalogue of all the books that were there. Nick didn’t know if they were all hexenbiest tomes, he’d have to wait for Adalind to come have a look at them, but he thought having a good idea of the books that CSU was expecting to find wouldn’t be a bad idea. He was really hoping it wouldn’t come to it but he wasn’t ruling out an irritating late night heist and book replacement from the near future.

Nick had moved on to cataloguing the jars of herbs when a uniform appeared in the doorway to say there were two women looking for him.

‘Send them through,’ Nick requested. ‘Make sure they’re both wearing gloves.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Moments later the uniform was back with a very eager looking Adalind and an intrigued Rosalee in tow. Adalind blew right passed him and made for the shelves, not even stopping to acknowledge his existence which made Rosalee grin.

‘Hi Nick, hello Wu.’

‘Rosalee,’ Wu greeted the fuchsbau.

‘Yes, hi Rosalee,’ Nick said loudly and pointedly, waving away the uniform with a smile of thanks even as he rolled his eyes at Adalind’s dismissive behaviour.

‘Oh yes,’ she said distractedly, ‘hi Wu who I now realise I actually haven’t been properly introduced to.’

This made Wu laugh and Nick considered it a sign that Adalind had managed to win him over already and that any future mention of the carpet eating incident would go over a lot smoother after such a charming first impression. Not that Nick had any intention of bringing up the carpet eating induced by her love cookies because that would mean first mentioning the love cookies and then explaining Adalind’s relationship to both Hank and Renard. That was just something Nick didn’t want to do while at a crime scene. Or, you know, ever.

Adalind had already started taking books off shelves and she handed them to Nick who fought the urge to put them straight back on the shelves. It helped that Adalind was offering running commentary.

‘I want this one and this one and yikes no one should ever have this one,’ so of course that book went into the growing pile in Nick’s arms. ‘Oh my god, no one has seen this book in two hundred years!’

‘If you kiss that book I’m withholding sex,’ Nick warned. There was just no way he could explain his girlfriend’s DNA on the cover of one of these books, especially if they ran her name through the system and realised he’d once had her arrested.

Adalind shot a dirty look at him over her shoulder. It was the first time since she’d entered the room that she’d actually looked at him properly. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ he replied, lips tugging upward in an amused smile despite his attempts to remain annoyed.

Adalind turned away from the shelf finally seeming to realise that she was being rude and that taking books off the shelves at a crime scene probably wasn’t the greatest idea. ‘You can’t leave these here,’ she explained. ‘They’re dangerous in the right hands and worse in the wrong ones.’

‘I’m getting that impression,’ Wu remarked dryly.

Adalind blinked at him and seemed to realise for the first time that Hank wasn’t around. ‘No Hank?’

‘He’s got that funeral today.’

‘The one for his ex-wife’s father?’

‘Yeah, that one.’

‘Oh, well, good.’

‘Yes.’

There was a beat of silence before Rosalee let out a sound of appreciation and Nick turned to see that while he had been occupied with Adalind and the bookshelves, Rosalee had drifted over to the desk and the little lab to take a look at the jars of herbs and spices.

‘Adalind’s right,’ Rosalee concurred. ‘This stuff is really dangerous.’

Nick sighed. ‘Alright, how do we get this stuff out of here then?’ The question was asked without any real hope of getting an answer. The how, he knew, was going to be left up to him. He turned to Wu, ‘Tell me CSU was done with this room.’

Thankfully Wu nodded. ‘They got what they could from the surrounding surfaces and they’ve taken prints and photos. There wasn’t much to get, apparently, though what they did get was well-preserved.’

‘Good conditions for it,’ Rosalee agreed absently, she was still combing through the jars with a close eye looking for anything they needed to remove. Nick got the feeling he would be talking to Renard today after all.

Woo. Hoo.

‘I’ll go see if I can get some boxes,’ Wu said and disappeared out of the room leaving Nick at Adalind’s mercy. She wasted no time turning back to the shelves to pick up right where she left off.

As she added each new book to her pile – now on the desk because Nick couldn’t hold them all – he noticed that as she touched each book the disguise on the book melted away and he could see them for what they actually were.

‘Is that a spell on the shelves or the books themselves?’ he asked.

‘The shelves I think,’ Adalind replied. ‘It would be too much effort to work something like this on each individual book, its why you can see them once I’ve taken them of the shelf.’

‘You could see what they really were, though, even in the photo I sent you?’

Adalind hummed her agreement and Nick left her too her work, turning his attention to Rosalee who was examining a jar with a look of great distaste on her face. ‘I think this is human liver.’

Nick peered at the jar but all he could get from a close look at the contents was something that looked like brown dust. ‘How can you tell?’

‘This mark on the bottom of the jar.’ She tilted the jar so Nick could see what, on first look, could have been mistaken for a mark in the jar itself, a flaw during the manufacturing process. ‘There’s a system to it but from what I can tell this mark means human.’

‘Great.’ They didn’t want the contents of this room getting into the lab if that was human remains in those jars. There’d been enough trouble the last time a ring of wesen trafficking in human parts had come across his desk. He wasn’t sure he could explain it away twice and as he expected to find horrible things in the secret lair of a hexenbiest his gut said the person who’s liver now resided in the jar wasn’t likely to be a contributing factor to the woman’s murder.

His instincts were leaning toward the big mark on the wall for that.

Wu came back with the evidence boxes and started packing the jars Rosalee set aside into one of them. Nick grabbed another and started stacking books inside. At the rate Adalind was pulling books off shelves he was going to need at least four boxes, maybe even five.

They worked quietly, Wu and Rosalee moving to help Nick when they finished with the jars until Adalind was satisfied she’d grabbed everything relevant off the shelves. The three large bookcases were only half empty which was better than Nick had been expecting but he now had five new boxes of books he had to fit into the trailer or the loft. Not to mention he had to find a way to cover up his taking of the items in the first place.

‘Scene’s clear now,’ Wu informed him, having taken a cursory trip out to his patrol car with a single evidence box filled with jars. ‘There’s only the two officers let on watch.’

Nick nodded, it seemed like the best way to remove the evidence was going to be to simply walk out the door with it and load it into his and Wu’s cars. It would look like he and Wu were logging the evidence on this end and then a little creative paperwork and some help from Renard on the other end should make it easy enough to have people looking the other way.

Adalind, who wasn’t allowed to carry any of the heavy boxes, left first with Wu who was juggling two. She looked like she was on her way out and just being helpful by opening doors and the trunk of his car. Nick took another two boxes and Rosalee lead the way out with the last of the books. She helped him load them into his car and then she and Adalind left, sparing no time for pleasantries or small talk so as to make it look as professional as possible.

Wu had a few last-minute instructions for the uniforms keeping watch over the scene and then they both left, pulling away in their separate cars. They didn’t have far to go. Adalind’s Range Rover was pulled discreetly onto the shoulder around a bend in the long driveway, far enough to be out of sight and ear-shot of the huge manor house. They made short work of transferring the boxes to her car and this time, Nick offered her a quick kiss goodbye. She and Rosalee would take the boxes back to the Spice Shop to be looked through properly; he and Wu would meet up there later, once they’d finished running through what they knew about the previous owners of the enormous house.

Wu waited until Nick was seated at his desk with a fresh mug of coffee before he leant casually back against the desk, crossed his legs at the ankles and said, ‘So Adalind’s pregnant, huh?’

Nick nodded, not ashamed in the slightest.

‘Six months?’ Wu guessed.

Again, Nick nodded, six months one week but he didn’t think Wu really needed to know that specifically.

‘You were still with Juliette.’

There was no judgement in Wu’s voice just a note of curiosity as though he were waiting for Nick to offer an explanation. Nick wondered if Wu thought the baby was someone else’s or if he thought Nick had cheated on Juliette. The casual way he’d stated the words didn’t give much away. Still, Nick wouldn’t lie to his friend and given the unique (very unique) circumstances surrounding the conception of their son he didn’t think he really had anything to be ashamed of. The first time had been a mistake of epic proportions. The second time, well, it might have been necessary but Nick hadn’t hated it and so he supposed the line got a little blurry there. It was getting blurrier and blurrier the more distance there was between him and Juliette.

‘It’s a very complicated story involving spells to look like other people and the loss of my powers as a Grimm,’ Nick replied without going into any detail. ‘Get to know us better and trust me, it’ll make perfect sense.’

Wu shrugged. ‘I liked her.’

He walked away without further comment and Nick turned back to his computer with a wry smile. It would be nice if Hank would see it that way but though his partner would have a better understanding of why Nick would have wanted to keep his powers and the lengths Adalind would go to for the things she wanted, he wasn’t sure Hank would find it so easy to like her.

Not that he would find out any time soon if he kept avoiding the topic every time Nick brought it up. With a sigh, he set up a couple of searches and then checked over his shoulder to see if Renard was busy. It looked like he was just working on some ordinary paperwork so Nick thought he’d best get the conversation out of the way. He knocked on the Captain’s door and waited to be called in.

‘Nick,’ Renard nodded. ‘Do you need something?’

Nick explained as best he could about the case they’d just caught, skipping over the details of how they’d discovered the books were something else and making it clear they’d found some unpleasant books he and Wu had removed for safekeeping with Rosalee’s help.

Renard nodded, ‘I’ll see that no one questions it.’

‘Thanks.’ Nick hesitated but now that he was in Renard’s office he felt like he should bring it up.

Renard noticed his hesitation and frowned. ‘Something else I can do for you?’

‘Have you noticed Hank acting weird?’

Renard’s expression didn’t change. ‘No, has he been acting weird?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nick admitted. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, something just doesn’t feel right.’ And he really didn’t like admitting that to Renard but the man was incredibly good at deception and tended to notice a lot more than you wanted him to. Nick had some hope that Renard’s constant scrutiny of him would have bled over to Hank as they worked so closely together on the wesen cases.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ Renard advised rather unhelpfully. ‘Let me know if you get anything more concrete.’

Happy to take that as a dismissal, Nick slipped out of Renard’s office just in time to greet Hank looking smart in a suit and fresh from a funeral. Apparently, his respect for his ex-wife didn’t stretch to sitting through the entire wake after the funeral itself. Nick couldn’t blame Hank for wanting to get away and he wasn’t surprised the man had come straight back to work.

‘Hey,’ he greeted, removing his suit jacket and hanging it over the back of his chair before taking a seat and loosening his tie. ‘We catch a case?’

Which left Nick trying to explain the case for the second time in just minutes without trying to give away Adalind’s involvement. This time it annoyed Nick that he was deliberately leaving Adalind out of the explanation and he resolved to get to the bottom of Hank’s strange behaviour sooner rather than later.


	19. Chapter 17

Necessary Sins – Chapter 17

 

Rosalee was behind the counter dealing with a customer when Nick entered the shop, a bag of take-out Chinese in each hand. Wu was right behind him with a third bag of food and a bottle of wine to help ease the irritation of not having found a single piece of useful information about their victim after hours of combing through missing persons reports and the deeds of the house – manor, mansion, whatever the hell you wanted to call it.

Rosalee smiled at them over the shoulder of her customer but something he said had the smile dropping off her face to be replaced by and angry frown. ‘No, it’s not something we normally stock but I can get it in for you, it’ll just take a couple of days.’

‘You can’t get it any sooner?’ the man pleaded. From behind, Nick couldn’t tell whether or not the man was wesen but he was twitching anxiously and Rosalee’s anger seemed to be on his behalf rather than directed at the man.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosalee shook her head. ‘I can offer you some tea that might help ease your wife’s symptoms in the meantime.’

Nick glanced curiously at the man as he passed through into the next room and then down the stairs to the basement. The guy looked terrible, there were bags under his eyes, his skin was pale and he was giving off the general look of someone who hadn’t slept in a few days and was going out of his mind with fear. Nick really hoped that whatever this man was dealing with didn’t suddenly become his problem.

He heard Rosalee explain the directions for the tea as he started down the basement stairs but didn’t give it much more though because Adalind and Monroe were standing shoulder to shoulder, leaning over a book. Adalind seemed to be explaining something and Monroe was nodding excitedly. The sight brought a smile to Nick’s lips, it was nice to see how easy Monroe interacted with Adalind these days. There was no more lingering tension or awkwardness between them and it lifted a weight off Nick’s chest every time he got to see it.

‘Tell me you guys found something that can tell us who our victim is,’ Wu almost begged as he came off the last step behind Nick.

Adalind and Monroe looked up from the book they were studying – they must have really been distracted by it as neither of them seemed to have realised he and Wu were there until the sergeant had spoken. They put down the bags of food at the other end of the table and moved to look at the book the two wesen had been studying. Nick’s hand slid across the small of Adalind’s back as he moved in close to see and she glanced up at him with a smile.

‘Hey,’ she greeted, tilting her head up to kiss the underside of his jaw. ‘How was the rest of your day?’

‘Long,’ Nick replied, rubbing small circles on her back with his thumb. ‘We couldn’t find anything on the identity of our victim – aside from confirming that she was wesen when we stopped by the morgue for a time of death.’

‘Mark under her tongue?’ Monroe guessed.

Nick nodded. ‘We did get a rough idea of the time of death, at least. The ME says five to six months but she’s waiting on some results before she can narrow it further – if she can narrow it further.’

‘Did you guys find anything?’ Wu asked again, peering down with interest at the book open on the table. It was the largest of the books Adalind had taken from the secret room and it was written in what looked like German but Nick couldn’t be entirely sure, the writing looked decorative and flowery. There weren’t any helpful pictures on the pages for those who didn’t speak the language – he was beginning to think he should learn, there were apps for that now and he doubted Adalind would leave him without help. What good were most of the books in his trailer if he couldn’t even read them?

He thought it would be a good idea to have Adalind teach their children all the languages she knew, it was supposed to be easier to start young, he’d heard, and he could always pick up some things along the way.

And he was already thinking about having another child with Adalind before this one was even born. If he hadn’t already known how much he considered Adalind his future that stray thought alone was enough to prove it to him. Along with the thought about more children and teaching them foreign languages came the whisper of a thought about what else he wanted to have in his future with Adalind, about how it would be nice to be able to call her his wife.

But that was a vague whisper of a thought for another day, right there in the basement of the shop he really needed to know who the victim was so he could find out who killed her and why.

‘I can’t tell you who the victim is,’ Adalind apologised. ‘She must have been powerful though, to put that illusion on the shelves.’

‘Do you think anything was taken?’ Nick wondered, it hadn’t looked to him as though any books were missing but he hadn’t even been able to see the true shelves until Adalind had him look properly. She’d be the one to know if something looked out of place.

She shook her head. ‘If whoever killed her wanted to steal something it wasn’t one of the books – there wasn’t a single space on those shelves to spare. I don’t know about the herbs and things and I’m not sure Rosalee could say either.’

‘What couldn’t I say?’ Rosalee asked from the top of the stairs. Done dealing with her customer, Nick assumed she’d locked up the shop for the night.

‘Whether any of the jars had been stolen,’ Monroe explained.

‘Nick and Wu had no luck identifying the woman,’ Adalind added.

‘We stock some of the items I found in those jars but we’re not the only place and I don’t remember selling anything to any hexenbiests. I haven’t even seen any hexenbiests since Adalind’s mother was in here.’

They all grimaced at the reminder causing Wu to raise an eyebrow and look around at them all with a questioning gaze. ‘There’s a story there.’

Nick shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter – and my mother killed Adalind’s shortly after.’

‘Your mother killed her mother?’ Wu repeated incredulously. ‘Because the natural progression from there is to get together and have a kid.’

‘Yeah,’ Nick grinned at the obvious sarcasm. ‘But it works.’

Wu couldn’t help but laugh. He seemed to be learning that when it came to life as a Grimm (and by extension life as the friend of a Grimm) normal was really strange and complicated and it was best to just roll with it. Wu would probably survive a hell of a lot longer with that (un)healthy attitude.

‘One day,’ Adalind mused, ‘we are going to have some really strange conversations with this little guy.’ She rubbed a hand over her belly.

‘Maybe we just don’t mention the crazy hate sex that conceived him or that the Grimm who did in his grandmother is his other grandmother?’ Nick suggested.

Monroe snorted, ‘I think we can say with absolute certainty we don’t want to be thinking about the “hate sex”.’

Rosalee and Wu nodded vigorously but Adalind grinned, ‘But it was such great sex.’

‘And we’re done talking about this,’ Nick announced. ‘So you didn’t find anything that can identify the victim?’

‘Nope,’ Adalind confirmed. ‘Whoever she was, she had an amazing collection of books.’

Nick thought the very fact that Adalind hadn’t fallen right on the Chinese food said a lot about how amazing those books were. In the last couple of weeks, she’d gone from being a little extra hungry to eating everything she could get her hands on and then going back for more. Strangely, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to mention this to her, she hadn’t put on as much weight as he’d have expected with all the eating she was doing.

But again, not something he was going to mention because saying that she hadn’t put on much weight suggested he thought she’d put on some weight and he had plenty experience with the pain Adalind could inflict from back when they were enemies. He wasn’t stupid enough to bring that down on his head.

Figuring that she was probably hungry even if she was too distracted right then to notice, Nick started handing around cartons and utensils. Following his lead Wu cracked open the wine and produced a bottle of water out of the brown paper bag for Adalind who took it with a smile.

‘Can you tell anything from the books or the herbs and things?’ Nick wondered. ‘I know you say the books are rare and awesome but is there anything in there that might give us a clue?’

Adalind shrugged but had to finishing chewing and swallow her mouthful of food before she could say, ‘Well she didn’t label her books with her name or anything like that but they are rare, someone out there must know something about the owner.’

‘So we ask around for anyone dealing in books and see if they know who might have purchased them?’ Wu suggested. ‘Who do we even ask about that?’

Monroe replied thoughtfully, ‘I’ve got an uncle who deals in rare books.’

‘And I’ve got some people I can ask,’ Rosalee added. ‘They don’t trade in rare books but they make it their business to keep an ear out for this sort of thing.’

‘I know some people,’ Adalind contributed.

‘No,’ was Nick’s immediate response.

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘I can put some feelers out.’

‘And let everyone know you’re back in Portland?’ Nick snapped. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Nick,’ she patiently reminded him, ‘the Royals all know I’m still here, the Reapers know I’m here.’

‘Renard doesn’t know you’re here.’ If Nick had any say in it Renard would never know Adalind was in town.

‘He doesn’t know we’re together,’ Adalind corrected. ‘He must know I’m in Portland, we haven’t exactly done a good job of hiding that fact.’

‘If he knew you were in Portland based on the rumours coming from the wesen we’ve left alive then he should know that you’re always with me,’ Nick reasoned. ‘He hasn’t said a word to me. He doesn’t know you’re here and its damn well going to stay that way.’

Adalind was annoyed now. ‘Diana isn’t even in the state, I don’t even know if she’s still in the country, she’s safe from him and his attempts to win power with the Royals and if I don’t know where she is I’m no use to him.’

‘You’re of plenty use to him,’ Nick disagreed. ‘You’re my biggest weakness.’

Most people might have found this confession sweet or romantic, Adalind rolled her eyes again. ‘I’m not buying it,’ she informed him. ‘You’d never let it go that far, you’d kill him first and I sure as hell am not letting him anywhere near me or our son.’ She paused to give him a stern look. ‘You need help, Nick, I can ask around, I will ask around.’

Nick let out an unhappy sigh but he couldn’t stop her from doing what she wanted and she was right, they needed all the help they could get finding the identity of the woman. The missing persons reports they’d been through didn’t match what they did know of their victim. There hadn’t been any reports tied to the property or any of the families or companies that had possessed the building in the last fifty years. The hidden room hadn’t appeared on any reports or in the original plans for the house. They couldn’t find any company that had been contracted to build it, mostly because they didn’t have a name to start with and the clothing the woman had been wearing was inexpensive though good quality available in a dozen different chain stores.

She hadn’t been wearing any jewellery and the x-rays of her body didn’t reveal any handy implants that could be traced through a serial number. He may not like it but searching out her identity through her books seemed about the only way they were likely to get her name. Without a name, they had no idea why anyone would want to kill her.

Accept for the prayer to Grimms she’d had on her wall.

‘What about the sign on the wall?’ Nick asked, happy to divert the conversation in a new direction. ‘Is that what that Fuentes guy was trying to emulate?’

‘I think he really was trying to make those mistakes,’ Adalind said again. ‘You’re right, though, the one on that wall was perfect, exactly what it should have been according to all the texts I’ve read, I’m just not sure why it was on her wall, though.’

‘Because she was a hexenbiest?’ Monroe asked.

‘No,’ Adalind shook her head, ‘because it’s supposed to be on the floor or the ground. You can’t accurately represent the cardinal points on a wall.’

‘Do they really need to be pointing in those directions or is the symbolism enough?’ Rosalee wondered, reaching for the mason jar she was using in place of a wine glass. ‘It’s not like these circles actually summoned a Grimm.’

‘How did they call on Grimms?’ Wu asked, around a mouthful of egg roll. ‘How does a circle drawn on the ground let someone know they’re needed?’

‘Especially when they might have been in another town or village,’ Nick agreed.

‘Man, back then they may as well have been on the moon,’ Monroe agreed. ‘How did a circle tell a Grimm where to be if they weren’t even there in the first place?’

They turned to Adalind who frowned, chewing thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Every reference I’ve come across just says they “called on the aid of the Grimm” or “our prayers to the Grimm were answered”.’

‘What about in the trailer?’ Monroe wondered. ‘Surely there’s a mention of this mark in there if it was something used to call Grimms.’

‘We couldn’t find anything,’ Nick replied. ‘What we do know came from the books Adalind had.’

‘There wasn’t anything in the trailer?’ Rosalee sounded surprised and Nick couldn’t blame her. There should have been a mention of it somewhere in there but he and Adalind had combed through a large chunk of the books during the Fuentes case and he knew she’d gone through the rest since. Every time she found herself with a little time to kill while they were out there she continued to look for answers. She’d never been satisfied with the outcome of that case and now Nick was beginning to think she might be right.

It wouldn’t just be Wu going over the Fuentes case the next morning at work.

Nick’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out expecting to see a message from Hank saying he was upstairs and to come let him in, he hadn’t wanted to stay in his suit and tie any longer, intending to go home and change before meeting them at the Spice Shop. Nick was honestly surprised his partner had lasted as long as he had in the suit, it wasn’t something he liked to do very often. Suits were for weddings and court appearances; they were no good for tromping around a crime scene and they tended to put witnesses on edge with their crisp formality.

It wasn’t Hank. It was his mother. He wasn’t ashamed to admit the noise he made was more terrified teenager than grown man but he hadn’t heard from his mother since he’d sent that last email letting her know Adalind’s second child was actually his. He really didn’t want to know what her response was.

He held his phone out to Adalind. ‘It’s an email from my mom.’

She recoiled from the phone, leaning into Rosalee and holding the carton of noodles and her fork up to ward him off. ‘I’m not looking at it,’ she protested. ‘She’s your mother.’

‘It’s about you.’

‘About me,’ Adalind repeated, emphasising the part of that sentence she thought was important. ‘It’s not for me.’

Nick gave her a look he hoped would convey just how little he wanted to read the email but Adalind wasn’t having any of it. Terribly amused by their unwillingness to read a simple email, Rosalee exchanged a look with Monroe. Nick didn’t think the look was fair, he and Adalind may have been acting a little immature but both Monroe and Rosalee knew how scary his mother could be, he doubted either of them would be looking forward to such an email from their parents let alone a Grimm.

After a few moments of silent battle, Nick caved in and opened the email. The subject line read “grandchild #1” and when he opened the contents of the email he realised it was a photo. It was a photo of Diana. Wordlessly he held the phone out to Adalind who didn’t seem to know what to make of the look on his face. He really should have been prepared for Adalind’s response.

Adalind’s eyes were immediately drawn to the picture of her daughter. She was growing so fast, faster than any normal child should and so Nick didn’t blame her for soaking in every pixel of the photo. Her eyes raked over the smile on her daughter’s face, the blonde hair growing in fast and the fact that she’d clearly grown like a weed since the last photo they’d seen. In that one she’d been playing with her toys looking months older than she was. In this one she looked about eighteen months old, her tiny features every bit her mother’s.

He knew the moment Adalind actually saw the subject line because she burst into tears. He’d been braced for it and so he hastily swept her into his arms and let her ride out the extreme emotion.

‘Dude,’ Monroe murmured, stunned, ‘what the hell was in that email?’

Wordlessly Adalind held the phone out to Monroe who took it gingerly as though worried it might explode. Rosalee and Wu crowded around him to get a look at the small screen and so it was a moment before any of them realised what the email said.

‘It wasn’t bad at all,’ Rosalee smiled. ‘She already thinks of you as part of the family.’

Nick’s phone trilled in Monroe’s hand and the blutbad reported that Hank was upstairs and he needed letting in ASAP. Monroe frowned and held the phone closer as though trying to make sense of the words he was seeing. ‘He says Josh is with him.’

‘Josh?’ Wu asked but Rosalee was already hurrying up the stairs to let them in, Nick fast on her heels.

When she unlocked the door and pulled it open they found Hank on the doorstep, arm wrapped around Josh’s middle in an attempt to keep him on his feet. Josh’s arm was draped across Hank’s shoulders but it didn’t look like it was taking any of the weight. Josh’s face was bruised and bloody, one eye swollen so badly it was a deep black and Nick didn’t think he’d be able to open it for days.

‘Oh god,’ Rosalee murmured. ‘Get him inside.’

Nick stepped forward to help Hank take some of Josh’s weight and he realised as he slid the man’s other arm overs his own shoulders how little of his own weight Josh was able to support. Between the two of them they managed to manoeuvre Josh inside and onto the little bed in the side room of the shop. Josh made a pained sound when they gently lowered him down that made Nick think he’d taken some damage to his ribs and maybe one of his knees as well.

‘What happened?’ Rosalee demanded, fingers probing along each of Josh’s obvious wounds as she checked him over, assessing the damage she could see, her concern growing with each new bump and scrape.

Josh either didn’t hear the question or was too far gone to answer. All Hank could tell them was that he’d bumped (literally) into Josh coming toward the Spice Shop and the man had done little more than grunt Nick’s name before he’d become a near dead weight for Hank to haul around.

‘Help me get his shirt off,’ Rosalee requested.

It took some doing but they managed to wriggle him out of his jacket and his sweater but when Rosalee pushed his t-shirt up and saw the state of his chest she went straight for the scissors and simply cut the t-shirt of.

Josh’s chest was a mess of ugly blue and purple bruises. Carefully, afraid to hurt him more, Rosalee probed along his ribs feeling for any lumps or bumps that could mean a break or fracture. Nick hoped she didn’t find anything to worry about, just looking at Josh’s beat up form worried him enough. It wasn’t just that Josh was hurt or that he was back in Portland when he should have been home, it was that he was hurt and back in Portland and Trubel wasn’t with him.

‘Did you see him get out of a car?’ Nick asked, hoping that Hank might have seen something they could use to help figure this out.

Hank shook his head but a quick check of Josh’s pockets produced a set of car keys. It also produced what looked like a grenade of some sort – Nick thought it might have been a flash bang or something similar – and a wad of notes folded in half and held together with a rubber band. The three of them stared at the money for a moment, taken aback by the large sum before he and Hank took to the street with the keys to try and find the car Josh might have arrived in.

It took them a good ten minutes of searching because, although Josh was hurt and walking had been a struggle, he’d still tried his best to ditch the car away from the Spice Shop. They followed the sound of the car alarm down an alley behind the bakery two blocks over and found a tan coloured older model sedan with Texas plates that neither of them had ever seen before.

As they got closer it became apparent that Josh hadn’t so much parked the car discreetly in the alley as used it to bring the car to a stop. The front bumper was crumpled against a large dumpster and there were scrapes all along the right-hand side of the car which went a long way to explaining how Josh had managed to drive himself to the shop with one eye swollen shut. It looked like he’d just bumped and scraped his way along as his eye had steadily gotten worse.

Hank used the keys to unlock the car and they started to go through it, taking note of the licence plate and the faded stick figures on the back window that depicted a man, woman, three kids and a pony. It didn’t strike him as likely the car belonged to Josh and he guessed that if they ran the plates the car would turn up stolen. He wondered if Josh had taken the extra step to switch the plates out from a different car to make it harder to trace.

Hank went through the glove box while Nick checked through the backseat. He found a shot gun under the passenger seat, a crossbow folded down under the driver’s seat and a leather bag filled with arrows, knives and disposable cell phones in the trunk. He didn’t find any shells for the shot gun which was odd but as the last time he’d seen Josh he hadn’t shown any particular skill with weapons he hadn’t been expecting to find the shot gun so there were odder things going on than a few missing shells.

‘Looks like the car’s registered to Waylon York,’ Hank said, holding up the registration papers he’d found. ‘Got an old revolver – loaded – and some protein bars in here too.’

‘Leave the papers and the bars, grab the gun,’ Nick ordered. ‘I don’t like this.’

They cleared everything out of the car that could be tied to Josh and wiped it down, cleaning away any fingerprints, takeout containers and empty drink bottles that could be used to identify Josh. They piled all of the weapons into the bag from the trunk and then tossed the keys in the dumpster. Before they left the alley, they looked around for any cameras that might have caught them but Josh had chosen well when he’d drifted awkwardly into that one. It was dark enough that the no one on the street was likely to just walk down it and the only camera they could see was broken, the lens shattered and wires dangling from the back.

‘When was the last time you heard from Josh?’ Hank asked as they started the walk back to the shop.

‘Couple of weeks maybe,’ Nick replied, he didn’t know for sure if Adalind had actually spoken to Josh but since a brief phone call a few weeks ago, Nick had gotten all of his updates from Trubel. She had mentioned Josh enough times that Nick knew they were still together. He’d assumed, wrongly judging by the Texas plates, that they were at Josh’s place but now he was beginning to wonder what else he’d missed because he’d assumed too much.

Maybe Adalind knew more, he’d have to ask her when he got back to the shop.

Where he’d left her in tears with only Monroe, Wu and his phone.

‘Shit,’ he hissed at himself reproachfully.

‘You think of something?’ Hank asked.

‘I’ve mostly been talking to Trubel the last few weeks,’ Nick said instead, waving off his recriminations as unimportant for the moment. And it was, unimportant right then anyway, Josh’s beat up appearance the fact that he’d arrived in a stolen car loaded down with weapons he shouldn’t have had was more worrying than Adalind crying because his mother had accepted her into the family with a nice (albeit cheesy) email.

He trusted that Monroe would have calmed her down, anyway.

‘She didn’t mention anything that would explain this?’

Nick shook his head. ‘She’s called a couple of times asking questions about certain wesen but she’s a Grimm, that’s nothing new.’

‘Was she with Josh?’

‘As far as I know they were still together but I never actually asked and she never really said, she just mentioned him often enough it was the impression I got.’

‘So if Josh is here looking like this where’s Trubel?’

‘Exactly,’ Nick agreed worriedly. ‘Where the hell is Trubel and is she okay?’

Wu was coming out of the shop when they arrived, phone in hand. ‘We’ve called an ambulance,’ he said. ‘Rosalee’s worried about his knee and a couple of his ribs. Plus, she thinks he took a pretty hard blow to the head.’

‘Is he conscious?’ Nick asked.

Wu shook his head. ‘He came ‘round for a moment and we thought he was trying to say something but then he passed out again.’

‘What did he say?’ Hank asked.

‘I think it’s a name,’ Wu replied. ‘And I think it was familiar.’

‘You recognised it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Wu said. ‘It sounded like Meisner Chavez.’

Nick growled, he didn’t actually mean to but he really didn’t like Chavez and he wasn’t a real big fan of Meisner either – for reason that he was absolutely not going to go into and had absolutely nothing to do with the current situation.

Hank swore. It was as much of a surprise to Nick as it was to Wu and they both looked at him to see a strangely guilty expression cross his features. ‘You recognise the name?’ Wu asked.

‘It’s not a name,’ Nick explained not taking his eyes off Hank. ‘Chavez was the FBI agent in charge of the Steward investigation, she was really interested in me as a Grimm and Meisner’s the resistance member who got Adalind out of Austria.’

‘Adalind was in Austria?’ Wu asked and then said, ‘Never mind, probably not the relevant part of that explanation.’

‘Those names mean something to you,’ Nick said to Hank suspiciously. ‘And I know I’ve never mentioned Meisner to you.’

Hank looked extremely uncomfortable and Nick would have said nervous as well but he’d never seen Hank look nervous before, not since those first weeks of knowing about wesen when he still tended to jump when they woged unexpectedly on him.

Wu narrowed his eyes, ‘Are we finally going to get an explanation or why you’ve been acting so weird?’

‘I haven’t been acting weird,’ Hank tried (and failed) to defend himself.

‘You’ve been acting really weird,’ Nick countered. ‘What do you know?’ his demanded, in the distance there was the sound of an ambulance coming closer.

‘It’s complicated,’ Hank said evasively and made to step around Wu into the shop but Nick got in front of him, placing a restraining hand to his partner’s chest.

‘You’re not going in there until I know I can trust you.’

‘What?’ Hank startled. ‘Come on, man.’

Nick stayed firm, it wasn’t a nice feeling suddenly distrusting Hank but Adalind was in that shop, Adalind who Hank had every reason to hate and who was pregnant with his son. Hank had been keeping things from them, things that seemed to have gotten Josh injured. His worry for Trubel only made it worse.

‘You don’t go in there until I know I can trust you.’

They stared at each other but Nick wasn’t willing to move and Wu stood solid behind him, whether he understood where Nick was coming from or just wanted answers neither of them were willing to let this go this time. Hank would tell them or he would leave, they were done waiting for answers.


	20. Chapter 18

Necessary Sins – Chapter 18

 

It was the arrival of the ambulance that prevented the stand-off from dragging on. Nick still refused to let Hank by him into the Shop but he didn’t stop Wu from showing the paramedics inside to help Josh. Forced to move away from the door to give them room, Nick used the hand he had pressed against Hank’s chest to push him further down the street.

‘I want answers,’ Nick said coldly. ‘I’m not letting you near my family until I know I can trust you.’

For a moment there was hurt in Hank’s eyes, genuine hurt that might have made the old Nick hesitate but this Nick had seen a lot of things and he wasn’t about to let a moment of hurt from someone he’d consider a friend get passed years of looking over his shoulder and being on guard for wesen attacks.

It was bad enough that he was using those instincts, that learned behaviour that he used to keep a step ahead of the Royals, on his partner, someone he’d considered a friend but when it came to Adalind’s safety, he’d much rather spend a few weeks gaining Hanks trust back than trusting too early and having something terrible happen to another person he cared about.

Because Josh was badly injured and Hank knew something.

‘You can trust me, Nick,’ Hank assured him.

‘I’m not sure I can,’ Nick contradicted. ‘What aren’t you telling us? Did you have something to do with Josh getting hurt? Do you know where Trubel is?’

‘You can’t seriously believe I’d have anything to do with Josh getting hurt!’ Hank sounded incredulous but Nick wasn’t quite ready to let himself get played by what he heard in Hank’s voice.

Jesus, he’d become so untrusting these last few months. ‘I don’t know what to believe,’ Nick snapped. ‘You’ve been acting weird for months and I let it go because I had my own problems to deal with but I can’t keep ignoring it.’ Jaw tight, he stared at Hank. ‘Tell me what you know.’

They stared at each other, Nick not willing to back down and Hank looking like he didn’t know what to do. Nick didn’t understand why Hank was keeping things from them, was it that bad? Nick was getting the impression his partner had gotten in too deep with something he didn’t know how to handle but that didn’t fit with what he knew about Hank. Hank was no dirty cop, he knew the kind of bad things that happened in the world – normal and wesen – and he’d never before shown any kind of leaning toward the wrong side of the law. Not outside of what they covered up regarding their wesen cases anyway.

That just made it worse, though, knowing that for years Nick had trusted Hank to deal with the wesen side of things and now instead of letting Nick in on what was happening he was hiding things, acting secretive and potentially getting their friends hurt.

‘Tell me,’ Nick said again, more forcefully. ‘Tell me right now what you know before someone else gets hurt – or worse.’

This caused a stir of emotion in Hank Nick wasn’t expecting, his gaze hardened and he clenched his own jaw before he spat out, ‘Someone already has been hurt worse,’ Hank snarled. ‘That funeral I went to today? You think my ex-father-in-law just dropped dead of natural causes?’

‘What?’ Taken aback, Nick took a step away from Hank.

Hank scrubbed both hands over his face and let out a tired sigh that came from so far within him Nick got the impression it was a soul-deep exhaustion. How had he not realised something so bad was going on with his own partner?

‘Chavez works for an organisation called Hadrian’s Wall,’ he said finally. ‘It’s a shadowy arm of the government that deals with wesen related crime.’

‘Chavez is part of it?’

Hank nodded. ‘It’s why she was so interested in you during the Steward investigation,’ Hank explained. ‘HW loves collecting Grimms.’

‘Trubel,’ Nick guessed.

Once again, Hank nodded. ‘I don’t know all the details, I’m not sure how they got her, but she was working for them for a while.’

Nick made note of the past tense in that reference to Trubel but for the moment he was more interested in getting to know how Hank had become involved and to what extent he was involved in a shadowy government organisation that apparently dealt with wesen. He wondered how long they’d been around and why they hadn’t approached him but those answers would have to wait. He’d just keep adding them to the growing list of things he would later demand from Hank and Josh.

‘How did you get involved?’

‘They wanted someone close to you, keeping tabs on you.’

‘You’ve been spying on me for them? For this group Chavez works for?’ Nick snarled, not at all impressed and glad he hadn’t trusted Hank and let him in.

Hank gave another sigh, fists clenched by his side as he seemed to struggle with his next words. ‘They threatened my ex-wives,’ Hank said eventually.

‘What all of them?’ Nick blurted out before he could stop himself.

‘All of them,’ Hank confirmed, wryly. ‘It was subtle at first. I’d get a phone call or a message from one of them thinking they were being followed home or that someone was watching them. Then I started getting the photos, surveillance shots of all of them, telling me that whoever was watching them could kill them without any time to react.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

Hank shrugged. ‘I thought I could handle it.’

‘Clearly you couldn’t.’

Hank glared at him for that remark but what did he expect? Nick could feel sympathy for Hank’s exes but he couldn’t yet find it in himself to forgive Hank for hiding this from him. This wasn’t on the scale of keeping a budding friendship hidden because he genuinely didn’t know how to explain it (and refused to believe for the most part it was actually happening), this was life-or-death wesen involved bad news and Hank should have known better than to keep it to himself.

And maybe he was being a bit unfair but Nick was worried about Josh and Trubel, concerned about what this might mean for Adalind because Hank had definitely and deliberately been avoiding learning anything about Nick’s new girlfriend which suggested he had fears that the people he was sort of working for wanted to use that relationship against Nick and he didn’t even know what else he should be worried about but he felt like the more Hank talked the more the list was going to get longer and longer.

‘What do they want?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hank answered. ‘They always approached me for information and I gave them what I could to keep them off my back.’

‘Why didn’t they approach me?’

Hank shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I think they were worried you’d kill them like Trubel killed Steward.’

That didn’t make any sense to Nick, if they were worried how he’d react when (if) they approached him because they’d seen how Trubel reacted why had they approached Trubel?

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Nick said. ‘They’ve got more to gain from approaching me than Trubel.’

Hank shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, they approached me wanting to know about our cases, about the wesen you deal with and where you stand with the Royals.’ Hank frowned. ‘It was weird, though, I don’t think I ever really told them things they didn’t already know.’

‘Then why keep it up? Why keep blackmailing you into helping them?’

‘I don’t know!’ Hank was frustrated now, the anger coming off him was soothing for Nick, though, because the fear he’d been feeling had eased somewhat as Hank had started to explain. He still didn’t understand why Hank hadn’t come to him when he realised he was in over his head but he gathered that the threats against Hank’s former family had something to do with it. The insinuation that his ex-father-in-law had been killed to keep Hank in line didn’t quite fit with the picture Hank was painting.

‘Something doesn’t add up,’ Nick muttered. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ Hank said unnecessarily. Nick had already gotten that memo but he gathered Hank was saying it to enforce the point that he didn’t want to be involved, that things had gotten out of his control. Nick wanted to stay mad at his partner but there were so many things he didn’t know and so many things he still needed to ask Hank and he really didn’t want to spend the rest of the night standing on the street outside the shop treating Hank like he was another suspect in their cases.

He was quiet for a long moment, watching as Monroe held the door of the shop open so the paramedics could wheel Josh out on a stretcher. Monroe glance over at them with a frown but he didn’t move toward them once the paramedics were gone. Instead, he closed the door once more, stepping back inside. Monroe wouldn’t hold it against Hank, he wasn’t like that but Nick assumed Wu had said enough to have his friends wary of the things Hank had been hiding from them.

Worse, they’d all be beating themselves up wondering how they didn’t see this before.

Nick turned back to Hank. ‘Is there anything I need to know now? Anything you’ve been keeping from me that could help us with this case or help me keep my family and friends safe?’

Nick hadn’t meant that to sound as though he wasn’t including Hank as a friend but it came out that way and he felt a certain satisfaction at the way Hank flinched at his words. He was mad, mad enough that there’d been a moment or two where punching Hank had seemed like a good option but he couldn’t. First and foremost, Hank was his partner, he’d been his friend for years and as much as Nick felt like throwing that all away in the face of these lies and half-truths he could admit that at that moment he might be overreacting a little. In the morning, this could all look like little more than an annoyance – though not for Hank’s ex-father-in-law, for him it had been kind of fatal.

‘There are things I don’t know,’ Hank said. ‘They didn’t tell me much, most of what I do know is incidental.’ Hank shot Nick a look he assumed was supposed to convey how earnest Hank was being. ‘I’m not part of HW, I don’t know much about what they do.’

‘That makes it worse,’ Nick pointed out. ‘You don’t know much about them but you still thought it was a good idea to pass them information about me.’

‘Why do you think I didn’t want to know about your new girlfriend?’ Hank demanded. ‘You think I liked passing that information on? You think I want to have them pulling my strings?’

‘I don’t know, Hank,’ Nick admitted warily. ‘You could have said no, you could have come to me, God, Hank you could have gone to Renard!’ And if that didn’t tell Hank just how mad Nick was he didn’t know what would. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Since Trubel left,’ Hank admitted.

For a moment, Nick could only stare at Hank. Months, this had been going on for months, the confirmation didn’t make Nick feel better, he wasn’t sure it could make him feel worse, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the anger wash freshly over him. Anger at Hank and anger at himself because when Trubel left that’s when things were changing and he’d been so caught up in his personal life that he hadn’t even noticed Hank was going through something.

Not that it was entirely up to him.

‘Look,’ he said tiredly, ‘I’m not doing this with you now. I can’t, I have to go to the hospital to check on Josh, I need to find out where Trubel is and I need to know that the people around me aren’t lying to me.’

‘I can check on Trubel,’ Hank offered. ‘Or go to the hospital.’

‘No,’ Nick said forcefully, ‘You really can’t. Go home Hank.’ He turned away, intending to walk back into the shop, update Adalind and the others and then either he and Adalind would go to the hospital or he’d head over there with Wu and Adalind could go home.

Hank stayed him with a hand to his arm. ‘Nick, come one, man.’

He pulled away from Hank’s grip. ‘Do you understand what you’ve done?’ Nick demanded. ‘Do you understand how seriously you have put my family at risk?’

It wasn’t the first time he’d used the word family tonight but it was the first time Hank cottoned on to it. ‘Family? What suddenly your new girlfriend is family?’ Hank scoffed. ‘Moved on from Juliette a little quick, didn’t you?’

The look Nick shot Hank then was pure Grimm and his partner smartly flinched back from him. ‘You have no idea how much that woman in there means to me,’ he spat vehemently. ‘You have no idea because you were hiding from the truth.’ Hank tried to interrupt but Nick wasn’t finished. ‘Oh, I get that in some twisted way you were trying to protect her, to protect me but you didn’t want to know, you didn’t ask and so yeah, that woman in there is family but so is Monroe, so are Rosalee and Wu, Trubel and even Josh. You put every one of us at risk by not telling us the truth.

‘There’s a reason this Hadrian’s Wall didn’t approach me, Hank, there’s a reason they went to you and Trubel first.’ Nick made sure he was looking Hank in the eye so that his partner understood just how serious he was when he said, ‘I would kill every last one of them to get to her. Every single one and it wouldn’t matter to me if they were human or wesen. Trubel may have killed Weston Steward but she doesn’t scare them nearly as much as I do.’

Feeling that he had said all that could be said on the subject without reaching a point of violence and physical harm, Nick turned and walked back into the shop. Adalind had joined them in the side room and the four of them were talking quietly about Josh’s injuries waiting for Nick to come back and update them.

He wasted no time retelling what Hank had told him – which wasn’t much – and the reactions of his friends matched what he’d been expecting. Monroe and Rosalee were wary now and while Adalind didn’t really have much to say on the matter (she didn’t have much of an opinion on Hank anymore but she was annoyed at him on behalf of Nick) Wu was angry that all this had been going on and Hank hadn’t thought to ask for help.

‘And you don’t know what this Hadrian’s Wall want with Grimms?’ Monroe asked.

Nick shook his head. ‘Hank didn’t seem to have any idea what they do, he could only tell me that they deal with wesen related issues.’

‘Deal in what way?’ Adalind wondered. ‘Does that mean they deal with it like you do or that they’re killing off problem wesen like your ancestors?’

‘They’re recruiting Grimms,’ Rosalee murmured. ‘That doesn’t exactly speak well of their intentions.’

‘Hank couldn’t tell you any more?’ Wu questioned. ‘He was just passing on information?’

‘That’s what he said,’ Nick confirmed. ‘I wasn’t exactly willing to listen, right now, I need to know Trubel is safe.’

‘I’ve been trying to call her,’ Adalind informed him. ‘The number I have for her has been disconnected and she doesn’t have Josh’s old phone either.’

Nick held up the leather bag he’d been awkwardly hanging onto during his semi-argument with Hank. ‘There’re a couple of burner phones in here, I’m not sure if any of them work or if Trubel has the number for them.’

‘What would Josh need a bunch of burner phones for?’ Monroe wondered. ‘This really isn’t making Hadrian’s Wall sound like a good place to work.’

Nick didn’t have an answer for that, any reason he could think of that Josh would need burner phones led to worrying questions about not only Trubel’s safety, but the thought that this Hadrian’s Wall was an organisation they would need to be watchful of. Nick already had enough to deal with what with the Royals gunning for him and the –

‘Do you think they’re behind all of the attacks on us?’ Nick asked Adalind.

She thought about it for a moment but in the end, shook her head. ‘No, I think that’s someone else. If Hadrian’s Wall knew enough about us to send wesen after us, then they wouldn’t need Hank spying for them.’

‘He said he didn’t feel like he ever told them things they didn’t know,’ Nick pointed out. ‘Maybe they were using him for something else and were the ones sending all those wesen after us.’

Adalind shook her head again. ‘No, I don’t see it. The wesen coming after us don’t have a government assassin vibe about them, they’re more guns for hire than highly trained killer.’

‘For which I am going to continue being grateful,’ Nick muttered. ‘Look, there’s not much we can do until we know more. I want to go to the hospital; I need to talk to Josh and see what he can tell us. If Trubel’s in danger, we need to know.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Adalind was quick to say.

‘Leave the burners with me,’ Wu suggested. ‘I’ll see if I can trace them, check for any calls Josh might have made with them. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of them has a number for Trubel in it.’ Wu reached for the bag and hesitated. ‘Will she talk to me if I do get in contact with her?’

‘She should,’ Adalind said. ‘I know I’ve mentioned to her before that you know about wesen now.’

‘Okay,’ Wu said. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

‘Can you two ask around, see if anyone has heard of this Hadrian’s Wall?’ Nick requested of Monroe and Rosalee.

‘Yeah, dude, we’ll ask around.’

‘What about Meisner?’ Rosalee asked. The question was directed toward Adalind but she shrugged.

‘I haven’t heard from him since he got me to Kelly in Austria,’ she explained. Turning to Nick she admitted, ‘Sean would be the one to ask about him. I think he used to work for Sean.’

Nick grimaced. ‘I really don’t want Renard getting involved in any of this. The more he knows the worse it’ll be for all of us.’

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘You can’t ignore him forever, Nick, as much as we both would like to.’

‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll talk to him in the morning if we haven’t found out anything more.’

‘Hopefully, Josh can tell us all we need to know,’ Adalind put forward. ‘He’d probably be in a better position than Sean anyway. I’ll send a message to your mother, too, see if she’s still in contact with the remains of the Resistance.’

‘The remains?’ Wu asked.

‘I’m not sure they survived getting me out of Austria,’ Adalind admitted without guilt. ‘The King was putting on a show of force last I heard to prove he could handle the throne.’

‘Somebody’s definitely trying to prove something,’ Nick agreed. ‘It’s been a long time since the Royals came down on me this hard.’

‘Us,’ Adalind corrected. ‘They want both of us badly enough to risk a lot of lives.’

‘Have you guys left anyone alive?’ Monroe wondered, eyebrows rising.

Nick shrugged. ‘Some,’ he admitted.

‘We need to make sure there are people alive to warn the others what happens when you come after us,’ Adalind reasoned.

‘I think you get scarier the better I know you,’ Monroe said, though he didn’t sound like he thought that was a bad thing. Adalind certainly took it as a compliment, if the wide smile on her face was anything to go by.

Nick snorted. ‘Come on, let’s get going. Hopefully by the time we get to the hospital they’ll be able to tell us something.’

‘Sorry to leave you with all the mess,’ Adalind apologised to Rosalee, retrieving her coat from the coat rack by the door and allowing Nick to help her into it. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow morning to look over those books some more.’

Rosalee waved away her apologies and promised to have the ginger tea she’d been making for Adalind waiting for her when she arrived. Wu followed them out onto the street, the burner phones now in a plastic evidence bag he’d had in his pocket while the leather bag and the weapons it contained had been left with Rosalee to lock away in the basement of the shop.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,’ Wu promised.

Nick promised to do the same and then he followed Adalind to her car, he’d left his own at work having seen no reason to take two cars to the Spice Shop and then home again. Adalind could drop him off at work in the morning or they could swing by on the way home from the hospital to collect it. She offered him the keys when they reached it and he slid easily into the driver’s seat.

‘Do you know much about Meisner?’ Nick asked. The last time they’d spoken about the man, Adalind had talked about him with a fondness Nick hadn’t liked. He couldn’t begrudge her the appreciation, the man had saved her life more than once and helped deliver Diana both in the literal sense and the metaphorical, carrying her much of the way to safety.

Adalind was well aware of the strange jealousy he felt toward Meisner but thankfully had only mentioned it once before. ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘I never had anything to do with him when he worked for Sean, I’m not even sure he did work for Sean, it was just a rumour I’d heard and something he said while we were in Austria. I think the Royal family killed his family but I also don’t know if he actually had a family to kill.’

‘What about the Resistance?’

‘Nothing. I’d never had anything to do with them before they got me out of Austria, I’m not sure I had anything to do with them then either. Sean arranged my rescue, at least I assume it was Sean. I know about as much about them as you do. Doesn’t your mom work for them?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nick said. ‘I’m pretty sure she was just helping out and I think that had more to do with taking away some of the Royals power than helping you.’

‘Hopefully, that email means she likes me now.’

‘I think she liked you before,’ Nick assured her. ‘But yes, I think that email says she considers you family.’

‘We hardly know each other,’ Adalind said. ‘We spent a few hours together on a plane and then in the car. We barely even talked, she just mentioned that she had a son and gave me some tips on helping Diana get through the flight without the pressure getting to her.’

‘My mom knew how to do that?’ Nick couldn’t remember taking any flights with his mom where she would have needed such a skill but then he supposed he would have been quite young. All of his memories after that of his mother (before she faked her death) were hazy or glossy with embellished fondness. Judging by the woman he was getting to know now, those memories he did have weren’t exactly accurate and it cast doubts on what he knew about his father as well.

‘Do you remember much about your parents?’ Adalind asked, picking up on his thoughts.

‘Some,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if what I remember about my mom fits with what I know about her now, though. Things are a little clearer with Marie, I remember exactly how weird she was before she turned up to tell me I was a Grimm.’

‘Were you close to your aunt?’

Nick shrugged. ‘I guess, she was all I had for a long time but she never really pushed me to keep in touch when I got older.’

‘I think that probably had more to do with trying to keep you away from wesen than not wanting to spend time with you,’ Adalind reasoned. ‘It’s strange to think about you not knowing about wesen until you met Monroe.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I guess as a wesen we’re raised to be afraid of Grimms,’ Adalind tried to explain. ‘It’s sort of hard to be afraid of them when you realise that the first you ever knew about wesen or being a Grimm was when you made me woge.’

Nick had never thought of it that way. Josh hadn’t learned about wesen and Grimm’s until his father was dying and Trubel had lost her parents young enough that she’d had no idea what she was or what she was seeing. Looking at it that way, his mother and aunt seemed to be the exception and not the rule having been raised by a man who taught them everything they’d need to know before it was thrust on them.

‘Would you want our son to know all about wesen and Grimms?’ Adalind asked. ‘I mean if he’s like you.’

‘Kind of hard not to, don’t you think. It’s not just that you’re a hexenbiest but he’ll be surrounded by wesen. Why should we lie to him?’

‘What if he’s like me?’ Adalind wondered. ‘Will you be okay with that?’

Nick looked over at her in surprise. ‘I love you and you tried to kill me multiple times, why the hell would I care if our son is wesen and has your powers?’

Bemused, Adalind said, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’

‘Would you care if he turns out to be a Grimm like me?’

‘I love you, don’t I?’ she parroted and he grinned. ‘Honestly, as long as he’s healthy I don’t care who he takes after.’

‘Could be a handful,’ Nick mused. ‘Two hexenbiests and a zauberbiest under the same roof.’

He was lucky they were stopped at a red light because suddenly Adalind was grabbing him by the front of his jacket and dragging him into a deep and passionate kiss that had his mind going completely blank.

As abruptly as she grabbed him she let him go and he could only look at her dazed. ‘What was that for?’

‘Because you never treat Diana like she isn’t part of your family,’ Adalind said quietly. ‘You make it easy to believe that I’ll get her back one day, that we’ll get to be a proper family and you won’t hold it against her that her father is a dick.’

‘Adalind,’ Nick said slowly, ‘I know you’ll get to see her again and hopefully it will be soon and when you do get to see her again, when she can finally come and live with us, then I hope I can be her dad too.’ She made a sniffling noise and he looked over at her in alarm. ‘Well don’t start crying!’ he hastened to add. ‘I can’t comfort you properly while I’m trying to drive.’

‘Pull over!’ she ordered with a teary laugh.

‘What?’

‘Pull over,’ she repeated.

He pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and no sooner had he put it in park and pulled on the hand break was Adalind scrambling awkwardly into his lap. He opened his mouth, to protest, or maybe to encourage her, he didn’t know, but she was gripping the front of his jacket again, her back pressed against the steering wheel and her not exactly small stomach pressing against his own. How she’d managed to get in that positon was a mystery to him, she’d found it hard enough to do before she started getting bigger.

But then she was kissing him and he didn’t much care how she’d managed to contort herself into such a positon. His hands automatically went to her hips, tugging her closer and she let out a moan that he swallowed with his kiss. She wriggled slightly atop of him and he squirmed trying to get into a better positon when suddenly the seat slid backward and he let out a startled noise that made her laugh. Her hands were still gripping his jacket so he could only assume she’d used those powers they’d just been discussing to give them some extra room to move.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he laughed between kisses.

Her hands slid up to cup his jaw and then up into his hair pulling tightly to tilt his head backward so she could better access the column of his throat.

‘But so good,’ she moaned, sucking on his pulse point.

‘Are you giving me a hickey?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Nope.’ And she was back kissing his mouth and his brain was filling with fog and lust and he tried to shift her again, wishing he had the room he needed to flip them over, to do all the things he really wanted to do but then they moved the wrong way and she hit the horn and the noise startled them both out of their lusty haze.

‘Jesus,’ Nick exhaled, trying to calm his racing heart. ‘I feel like a teenager again.’

Laughing Adalind tried to wriggle free of her position and return to the passenger seat but she couldn’t quite manage it. ‘I think my foot is stuck,’ she giggled.

It took some doing (and some seriously ungraceful moves) but eventually Nick managed to lift her and slide her back into the passenger seat. ‘Well,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘Hospital?’

‘Yes,’ Adalind agreed, breathlessly.

Shaking his head, Nick put the car back in gear and pulled back onto the road.


	21. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Josh tries to give them some answers and something is definitely up with Hank.

Necessary Sins – Chapter 19

 

Josh was awake when they reached the hospital but he was loaded up on painkillers and so having a conversation with him was (literally) like trying to interview a stoner. They’d only gotten I to see him because Nick had waved his badge around and told them he was Josh’s only living relative. The fact that, through some distant relation this might actually be true was irrelevant but it got them in to see Josh while he was waiting to have his arm plastered and the doctors decided on how best to treat his knee.

According to his chart, which Adalind lifted from the end of Josh’s bed as though it was perfectly normal to peruse someone’s personal medical files, he’d fractured his arm and cheek, badly twisted his knee (potentially he’d dislocated it and either popped it back in himself or not noticed and it had naturally slid back into place – which suggested it hadn’t fully slipped the socket) and cracked a few of his ribs. That didn’t take in to account the beating he’d taken and the scratches and bruises the doctors were taking to be from blades but Nick suspected came from claws.

Whatever he’d gotten involved in, it had certainly done a number on Josh and Nick was terrified to think that Trubel could be out there someone as bad or even worse and they had no way to find her.

A nurse came into the room and Adalind lazily placed Josh’s chart back into place. Nick went into cop mode immediately, asking her a barrage of questions about Josh’s state and (most importantly for Josh’s continued safety) when they’d be able to take him home (and by home he meant Monroe’s because he and Adalind didn’t have anywhere to put him).

‘I’m sorry,’ the nurse told them. ‘He’s going to need to spend the night. Can you arrange to have someone watch him?’

They had their backs to the bed so it came as a surprise when Josh spoke in a suddenly sober (pained) voice, ‘Oh, guess I do metabolise those quickly.’ They spun around and Josh said, ‘Ow.’ He locked eyes with Nick and the nurse before meeting Adalind’s gaze.

She flinched. It wasn’t much, hardly noticeable, but Nick was very good at reading Adalind (so long as hormones weren’t involved, those things were designed to make men crazier than the women they were tormenting). He peered at Josh intently but couldn’t see what she’d obviously seen and Josh didn’t seem to have noticed so Nick put it off to ask about later.

The nurse rushed around them to check on him and Nick and Adalind waited patiently while she did her thing. Once she’d left to check up on another patient, Adalind broke the silence with, ‘You’re a Grimm.’

That explained the flinch then, Nick realised. He supposed the only reason Adalind hadn’t woged was because she spent all her time around a Grimm, the knee jerk reaction to suddenly being confronted with one just wasn’t there. He wondered if that would keep her safe from other Grimms. It was worth thinking about, her reaction had only been noticeable because he knew her so well, chances were that any other Grimm she came across wouldn’t have even noticed. He wondered if there were other ways to tell she was a hexenbiest – aside from the tongue thing. He’d like to think the only person going anywhere near Adalind’s tongue would be him and maybe her dentist.

But those were thoughts for later.

Josh was on the bed, holding his unbroken arm against his ribs and wincing every time he breathed. ‘Started about a week ago,’ he said. ‘I thought for sure it wasn’t going to happen to me.’

‘What happened to you?’ It wasn’t clear whether he was asking about now or then but Josh seemed to think then was the more important thing to discuss. Nick noted that he didn’t seem concerned about Trubel so unless he’d forgotten all about her (which Nick doubted) Josh seemed to think Trubel was in no immediate danger. He started to relax slightly.

‘They call themselves Hadrian’s Wall,’ Josh told them. ‘Some sort of government agency that’s supposed to deal with wesen, they wanted another Grimm and they wanted to know if they could trigger that part of one.’

‘Trigger how?’ Adalind asked shrewdly.

Josh shot her a rueful look and it struck Nick that he hadn’t required an introduction. ‘Adrenalin, I guess,’ Josh answered. ‘They picked me up at a bar in Tucson, I don’t even remember when – it wasn’t fun, they did things to me, tried to get me to fight, tried to get me to kill and then I guess they finally got something right because something shifted and now I’m a Grimm like my dad.’

Josh was glossing over a lot of details, that was obvious but Nick wasn’t going to force the issue just yet. ‘What about tonight?’ he waved a hand to indicate all of Josh’s injuries.

‘I was done,’ he said simply. ‘I got out.’

‘What about Trubel?’

‘She’s worse off than me,’ Josh replied, ruefully.

‘What?’ Adalind screeched in alarm.

‘Oh, I doubt she’s hurting like this,’ Josh lifted his broken arm with a wince for emphasis, ‘but she’s a good little Grimm who knows what she’s doing. She’s valuable to them.’

‘I think you need to start at the beginning,’ Nick spoke. ‘Tell us everything.’

Everything turned out to be not all that complicated and so very complicated at the same time. While Josh’s part in it all hadn’t started until he left Portland with Trubel, Trubel had already been approached before she left.

‘You remember that FBI agent?’ Josh asked. ‘Chavez?’ Nick nodded. ‘She kidnapped Trubel off the street one day, really freaked her out, its why she was so eager to leave Portland. She thought if she could get away then she’d be free of them. I don’t know if she just thought they’d put her away for that thing with Steward or if she was worried they’d kill her but it was okay for a bit, I went home and Trubel followed.’

‘But so did this HW,’ Nick surmised.

Josh nodded. ‘This time they offered Trubel a job. Huge benefits, lots of money, great tech, it seemed like a good deal.’

‘You didn’t think so,’ Adalind gathered.

Josh shrugged. ‘They were interested in me too, at first it was like what you do here, we just investigated wesen related crimes, but then it got more complicated, they’d send me or Trubel out on our own – I think they wanted to see how I’d handle things without being a Grimm or wesen and they wanted Trubel in more dangerous situations. They were testing us.’

‘Testing you for what?’ He hadn’t much liked the sound of Hadrian’s Wall when Hank had spoken of it but now, hearing more about it from Josh he knew he didn’t like this place at all. Chavez had been right to go around him, if they’d tried any of this on him, he wouldn’t have gone down without a fight and he supposed Josh hadn’t either, if his injuries were anything to go by.

‘HW wants good little Grimm soldiers to blindly follow them. Something big is coming and they want to stand and fight it.’

Nick felt his stomach twist, this was exactly what he’d been afraid of. ‘Something big?’

‘Black Claw,’ Josh explained. ‘They’re an underground wesen group determined to come out in the open and claim the rights they feel they’ve been denied. They think wesen should be in power and that the world needs to know them for what they really are.’

Nick and Adalind could only stare blankly at him for a moment. The idea of wesen being out to the public was not something Nick had ever considered before; it wasn’t something he wanted to be considering now. The few people he knew who had encountered wesen hadn’t necessarily handled it well. People had been shot, killed, eaten, mauled, traded for parts, the list went on and on. It wasn’t a pretty picture and he had serious doubts that coming out would improve them any, he imagined there’d be calls to lock them up, to kill them all, declarations that they weren’t human, merely animals and should be caged up.

Nick knew that Adalind was someone to be afraid of if you wronged her but that was because he knew she was a powerful hexenbiest who wasn’t afraid to fight for what she wanted or to fight back if the world (or someone) wronged her. He didn’t like the idea of people being afraid of her, of being afraid of their kid, just because of what she was and not who she was. He absolutely respected anyone smart enough to be wary of her for who she was because he was very away as her former enemy that she could be a vindictive bitch when she wanted to be. He didn’t like the idea that someone would hate her and judge her for simply being a hexenbiest.

Though he supposed his ancestors had been doing that for centuries.

‘Are they insane?’ Adalind demanded suddenly. ‘That’s a terrible idea.’

Josh nodded and then grimaced. ‘That’s why HW is trying to stop them.’

‘Well, they’re not exactly going about it the right way,’ Adalind snapped. ‘What does Meisner have to do with all of this?’

‘Meisner?’ Josh asked with surprise. ‘How do you know about Meisner?’

‘HW approached Hank,’ Nick explained. ‘They’ve been blackmailing him for information on me.’

Josh nodded like that made perfect sense and Nick supposed that as he’d been spending so much time dealing with this HW it probably did to him. ‘Trubel and I didn’t tell them anything they couldn’t have already found out themselves – and they find anything they want. Meisner’s the head of HW here, Chavez works directly under him.’

‘How did that happen?’ Adalind wondered. ‘He was working for the Resistance last I saw him.’

‘There is no Resistance anymore,’ Josh answered. ‘The Royals pretty much killed them all and Black Claw either killed or turned the rest.’

‘Is this Black Claw the ones that have been sending people after Nick and I?’

Josh shrugged. ‘Maybe? I don’t really hear much about what’s going on here – and that’s intentional – so I don’t know what the deal is with Black Claw in Portland and you’ve done a pretty good job of staying a step or two ahead of HW.’

This was a huge surprised to Nick. ‘Have we?’

‘They wouldn’t be blackmailing Hank if they knew everything they needed to,’ Josh pointed out. ‘I don’t think they know about Adalind,’ he added. ‘Maybe it is Black Claw sending wesen to attack you.’ His words were starting to slur and his winces every time he moved more pronounced.

‘I’ll go get the nurse,’ Adalind said softly, turning and leaving the room.

‘You need to be careful, Nick,’ Josh said quietly after Adalind had left. ‘If HW finds out about her, if they find out you have hexenbiest for a girlfriend they’ll try to use her. Black Claw will do the same, Trubel said she’s really powerful.’

‘If either of them lay a hand on her it’ll be the last thing they do.’

‘You can’t kill them all,’ Josh cautioned him.

‘Who said anything about me?’ Nick grinned darkly. ‘Adalind can take care of herself.’

‘Yes, Adalind can,’ the hexenbiest herself agreed, returning to the room with a nurse who was holding a plastic cup filled with painkillers and another of water. ‘Wu sent a couple of uniforms to keep an eye on Josh,’ she told Nick. ‘I figured you’d want to speak to them yourself before we go.’

Nick nodded, realising that he wanted to talk to them, not only to give them instructions on what to look for but also because he wanted to get a good look at them to make sure they weren’t secretly wesen or working for HW or this Black Claw. Not that he had any idea how he was supposed to know either of those things just from a look but the action itself would make him feel better.

And it did make him feel better. He ducked out of the room to talk to them and saw that Wu had sent over two uniforms he actually knew. He wasn’t going to say he trusted them but he had worked with them often enough that he wasn’t worried about them being wesen who were likely to attack Josh while he was doped out on painkillers. He briefed them quickly, explaining that anyone who did come looking for Josh would likely be professional and know exactly what they were doing. He was grateful they didn’t ask him too many questions and once he was satisfied they would be okay he went back inside to have a last quick word with Josh.

Josh was asleep though and Adalind was talking in an undertone to the nurse. She saw him come back in, thanked the nurse and joined him at the door. She waited until they were halfway down the corridor before she spoke.

‘He’s going to need surgery on his knee but they’re not worried about the fractures or his ribs.’

‘Surgery’s going to take longer.’

Adalind nodded. ‘He’ll need to spend a few days here at least and then he’ll need physical therapy for a little while.’

‘Do you think because he’s a Grimm now it’ll heal better, faster?’

This time Adalind shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Grimms heal fast but most of them don’t heal like you. With everything you’ve been through, your abilities are heightened, Josh might heal fast but I don’t know how fast.’

It was better than nothing and at least something positive he could tell the others when they met up at the Shop again the next morning. He hadn’t called Hank, wasn’t sure if Wu had either but that was good, he needed a little extra time before he wanted to deal with that.

‘I’ve never even heard of Black Claw,’ Rosalee admitted. ‘Josh says they’re some kind of wesen rebels?’

‘For lack of a better term, yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘According to this HW, Black Claw wants wesen to come out into the open.’

‘That’s a terrible idea,’ Monroe immediately countered.

‘It’s a horrible idea,’ Adalind agreed.

‘It’s war,’ Wu said.

They all turned to look at him, gathered around the table in the side room. ‘What?’ Nick questioned.

‘War,’ Wu repeated. ‘This isn’t going to be some easy revelation – trust me, I know – it’ll start a war, wesen against human. War.’

‘He’s right,’ Rosalee agreed. ‘People will get scared and when they get scared they lash out. If this Black Claw succeeds in outing wesen, there’ll be so much blood and violence.’

‘So you think HW is a good thing?’ Nick wondered. ‘Because they’re trying to stop this?’

‘Hell no,’ Rosalee was quick to say, ‘They’ll probably just make it worse.’

Nick couldn’t disagree, he didn’t know enough about HW and what he did know didn’t sit well with him. They were the reason Josh had turned up in a stolen car broken and bleeding. They were the reason Hank’s ex-father-in-law was dead (apparently) and the reason no one had heard from Trubel in a while. Nothing they’d done so far seemed like a good thing and Nick feared he had not one but two new enemies to contend with.

Because it wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to deal with, what with the Royals already gunning for him and his cases at work piling up, not to mention his normal duties as a Grimm.

‘There are too many things we don’t know,’ he realised. ‘Josh can tell us more, when he’s out of surgery but until then we need to focus on finding Trubel, on making sure Hank isn’t about to get himself killed.’

‘We need to find out who the people attacking us are,’ Adalind added.

‘And solve our hexenbiest murder,’ Wu supplied unhelpfully.

Nick grimaced, too many things to do, so few hours in the day. He sighed. ‘Okay, forget about Trubel for now, Josh doesn’t seem to think she’s in immediate danger and I’m sure he’s got a way to get in contact with her. We need to find out if anyone here in Portland has heard of this Black Claw, if anyone knows about HW and if there is anyone who could identify our hexenbiest who seems to have been calling on Grimms.’

‘Oh,’ Adalind said quite suddenly. ‘Black Claw!’ she started rummaging through her handbag and pulled out her purse. Bewildered they all watched her until she’d dug a white business card out of her purse and held it up triumphantly. ‘Black Claw.’

Bemused, Nick took the card from her and recognised it as the one they’d found on Fuentes when he’d attacked them. He frowned and considered asking Adalind why she had it and it wasn’t stored in an evidence locker but then he thought better of it. If he didn’t ask, he didn’t have to know.  
The card was small and white, perfectly ordinary card stock and on it were four diagonal marks in jagged black ink that he realised now were supposed to represent claw marks.

‘You think Fuentes was Black Claw?’ and then his instincts and brain made a leap he really didn’t want them to. ‘You think Fuentes faked those Grimm circles to cover up this murder.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Adalind replied. ‘But they’re connected they have to be.’

‘They are,’ Rosalee said, she took the card from Nick and then went on her own quick search through a pile of papers on the end of the table. She withdrew a calling card like the one Adalind had shown her, though this one wasn’t a professionally made business card, it was a torn piece of notebook paper. ‘I found this in one of the dead hexenbiest’s books.’

Wu took the paper from her and frowned down at it. ‘Do you think our victim was Black Claw?’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Nick answered him. ‘I don’t think we know enough about this. We need to talk to Hank, we need to talk to my mother and we need to find Trubel.’

‘We need to do a lot of things,’ Adalind murmured. ‘Wu can call Hank, he needs to be here for this. Monroe, Rosalee and I will make some calls see if anyone knows anything about the dead hexenbiest or anything about Black Claw or HW, yes,’ she added with a roll of her eyes when Nick went to interrupt, ‘we’ll do it without mentioning them. You can try and find a way to get in contact with your mother that doesn’t take three weeks to get a response.’

They all nodded, it seemed like as good a plan as any. ‘I’ll have Bud go around and talk to Josh,’ Nick decided. ‘He’s not much help in a fight but he hears things and he might get something out of Josh that we don’t see. Plus, he hasn’t been able to get hold of Trubel either – I checked.’

Unfortunately, as good a plan as it seemed, Nick didn’t know how he was supposed to get hold of his mother any easier. The best he could do was send her an email requesting she call as soon as she could because things were heating up in Portland. He called Bud next and asked the man to stop by the hospital to check on Josh and asked the eisbiber to get what he could from the new Grimm about HW and Black Claw, which involved explaining what they knew about both groups (which wasn’t much) and listening to Bud fret over what that would mean for their families.

Nick didn’t like the thought of his family being put in danger any more than Bud did and it was proving to be just as motivating to Bud as it was for Nick. Nick had no doubt that Bud would have something more for them by the end of the weekend, his eisbiber friend heard all the wesen gossip and spread quite a bit of it on his own.

‘I called Hank,’ Wu told him, crossing back across the room to Nick as they’d all spread out to avoid talking over the top of one another making their dozens of different phone calls. ‘He’s on his way with the fancy new burner HW left at his house last night.’

‘Great,’ Nick grimaced.

‘I also spoke to the lab and they couldn’t give me anything off the ones Josh had with him. Most of them haven’t been used and the one that had only made a single call – which was to a payphone in New Jersey.’

‘A pay phone?’ Nick repeated. ‘In New Jersey?’

‘Yep,’ Wu said. ‘I’m trying to pull surveillance from the area at the time of the call but it’s going to take time.’

‘You think it was Trubel?’

Wu shrugged. ‘Who else would it be?’

Nick couldn’t argue, Josh didn’t have any family left and he’d shown more than once that when he was in trouble it was to Portland and the friends he’d made there that he ran. Which made sense to Nick, going to another Grimm for safety was a lot smarter than struggling like Trubel had done on her own for all those years. It was just another reason he didn’t like the idea of her alone out there now. He knew she could handle herself but he hoped that she knew by now she wasn’t alone, that she didn’t have to handle things by herself anymore.

Nick hoped the fact that Trubel hadn’t shown up yet was a sign that she’d fallen back on old habits of running and hiding instead of seeking out help. He preferred to think of it that way than to consider that unlike Hank and Josh, Trubel didn’t see HW as a bad thing.

He shook away the thought. Trubel liked it in Portland, she’d come to trust Nick and his friends, she even liked Adalind, if she was in trouble she’d come back to Portland like Josh had. The fact that she wasn’t here yet meant that she was being prevented from slipping away or she was on her way. Trubel would never have stood by and let Josh get hurt, that suggested to Nick she hadn’t known how bad it was or hadn’t known at all that it had happened.

His money was on the latter. ‘How long ago was that call to New Jersey?’

‘Four days,’ Wu told him. ‘It only lasted twelve seconds.’

Twelve seconds didn’t sound like a long phone call but it was long enough to convey a quick message. Nick had managed to convey things to Adalind in far less time, they knew each other so well, and he imagined Monroe and Rosalee were the same. He wasn’t speculating on the nature of Josh and Trubel’s relationship exactly, but they’d spent a lot of time together just the two of them and they were good friends. He felt it was safe to assume they could convey a fair bit of important information in a twelve second phone call.

Either they’d come through in New Jersey and Wu would have some useful surveillance or Josh would be able to explain the phone call, either way, they were one step closer to finding Trubel.

Monroe was the last to finish up his phone calls but he at least had some useful news. ‘Adalind was right about those books,’ he shared. ‘Some of them are really rare and have been missing for a long time. Uncle Felix gave me the names of the people last known to have them and he said he’d look into them for me.’

‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘it’s more than we had before.’

‘None of my contacts have heard anything,’ Rosalee reported. ‘I’m still waiting for a call back from the Council.’

‘Most of mine won’t even take my call,’ Adalind admitted with a great deal of annoyance. ‘I’m contemplating cursing them all as a reminder of who I am.’

Nick should probably have been worried that the idea of his girlfriend cursing a bunch of random wesen didn’t bother him. He assumed it was because the sort of people she was talking about probably deserved a good cursing and not that he was happy to overlook anything Adalind did because he was stupidly in love with her.

He compromised with himself, admitting that it was probably a bit of both.

‘Should we get food?’ Rosalee asked suddenly, breaking Nick from his thoughts.

‘What?’ he asked at the same time Adalind said, ‘Yes,’ in a tone that suggested this was the best suggestion she’d heard all morning. She’s only eaten breakfast an hour before, though it hadn’t been particularly substantial, just a piece of toast.

‘Let’s do brunch,’ Rosalee suggested.

‘Brunch?’ Nick repeated sceptically. ‘Since when do we brunch?’

‘Since I’m hungry and want food,’ Adalind offered.

‘Brunch, it is,’ he agreed. ‘Wu can call Hank, have him meet us there.’

Wu nodded. ‘Somewhere public where he can’t try to kill your girlfriend?’

Adalind snorted. ‘Like he could.’

‘Yes,’ Nick agreed. ‘But then I’d be trying to explain how my tiny pregnant girlfriend killed a cop – my partner – over brunch. And I’m just not sure “he took the last bread roll” is a reasonable excuse.’

This got a laugh out of all of them. ‘Just so long as you know I could still take him.’

‘Adalind,’ Nick said with great fondness, ‘Last week I watched you kill a klaustreich with a teaspoon, I’m not doubting you.’

Adalind grinned. ‘He had it coming.’

‘Yes, he did,’ Nick agreed, wrapping her scarf around her and used it to tug her closer as they got ready to leave so he could steal a quick kiss.

‘Are they always this adorable?’ Wu asked Monroe and Rosalee in an intentionally loud whisper. The way he said adorable sounded like he meant sickening and Nick shot him a glare over Adalind’s shoulder.

‘Yes,’ Monroe and Rosalee answered without missing a beat but they were both smiling with amusement so he let it go.

They didn’t end up going very far, just down the street, and got a table toward the back where Nick had a nice view of both entrances, the brightly lit hallway that led to the bathrooms and the kitchen as well. They left a space beside Wu (who was next to Monroe) free for Hank which put him opposite Nick with a nice unobstructed view of Adalind who was sitting between him and Rosalee. There was a good chance things would get heated seconds after Hank noticed who was sitting at the table but Nick really did hope the public setting would deter Hank from making a scene.

It had certainly stopped him; he’d had to hunt Adalind down outside the bathroom last time they’d been at a meal with Hank. It was funny how, looking back on that moment, he was seeing things differently. He wondered what would have happened if he’d kissed her, if he’d taken all those stupid flirty comments and done something about them.

They’d probably have ended up fucking in one of the stalls. He snorted.

‘What?’ Adalind asked.

He shook his head, murmuring, ‘I’ll tell you later.’

Hank came in then, he stopped by the hostess but spotted them and continued walking. Nick could see the exact moment he took in exactly who was sitting beside him because he froze and it wasn’t anything subtle like Adalind’s wince from the day before. This was feet grinding to a halt, mouth dropping open and then snapping shut with an audible sound kind of reaction. Nick made no effort to remove the arm he had draped along the back of Adalind’s chair. He locked eyes with his partner and just waited.

He was giving Hank the choice. He could make a scene, he could walk out, or he could take a seat. Each choice would have a different result. If he made a scene, there was every chance Adalind would end up killing him or Nick himself would end up punching Hank. If he walked out, it would be a sign that Hank wasn’t willing to deal with this but it would also say that he couldn’t overlook it to deal with the bigger threat of HW.

Really, Hank’s only option was to take a seat and Nick was content to sit there and stare at him until he saw that Hank had realised it too. With sharp jerky movements, Hank moved forward to take the empty seat between Wu and Monroe. He didn’t look at Adalind, his gaze directed solely at Nick. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Rosalee squeeze Adalind’s hand under the table and knowing those two, it was less about comfort and more about stopping Adalind from launching the first attack.

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Hank hissed. ‘Her? Really? Man, you’ve lost your damn mind!’

Hank was angry, surprised – definitely surprised – but he stayed in his seat, leaning forward so he could hiss his words at Nick in an attempt to keep them for the table only and not the whole café.

‘Are you seriously telling me I’ve been protecting her from HW and all their shit?’

Nick’s expression turned cold in an instant. He withdrew his hand from Adalind’s chair and leant forward to meet Hank’s incredulous glare with a cold hard look of his own. Before he could say anything, though, Hank spoke again.

‘What the hell did she do to you, this time?’ Again, it was entirely the wrong thing for Hank to say.

Nick’s response, though, wasn’t at all what Hank was expecting. ‘She trusted me,’ he said simply. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

Hank snorted. ‘She trusted you? Come on, are you serious? After everything she’s done?’

‘You mean after everything I’ve done?’ Nick countered.

‘That’s not the same,’ Hank said.

‘I think it is,’ Nick informed him.

‘Bullshit,’ Hank snapped. ‘She’s done something, another love spell like those cookies.’

‘Love cookies,’ Monroe whispered in an undertone to Wu, ‘we’ll explain later.’

Nick shook his head. ‘We’re not here to talking about who I date,’ Nick snapped.

To which Hank could only snort, ‘Date?’

‘This is your last – you only – chance to tell us everything you know about Hadrian’s Wall.’

‘Nick,’ there was more than anger in Hank’s voice now but Nick wasn’t willing to hear it.

‘Your choice Hank,’ he said. ‘You sit here and tell us what you know or you walk away right now and we’re done.’

‘What? Come on, man.’

‘You’re choice, Hank. Stay or go?’


	22. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adalind and Nick seek help from an unexpected source and things with Hank get a little more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the comments and kudos, have a new chapter!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 20**

 

 

Adalind was lying on their bed with her feet resting on the headboard because, apparently, her ankles were swollen. Nick couldn’t say he’d noticed her supposedly puffy ankles but he could also say that he wouldn’t have said anything even if he had. It was that whole not having a death wish thing coming into play. She had a couple of pillows stacked under her head and shoulders and she was resting a bowl of M&Ms on her belly while she listened to some sort of lecture on her phone. The incredibly dry words of one of the law professors was enough to put Nick to sleep but Adalind seemed to be interested enough to keep awake. Though, he suspected that had more to do with the bowl of chocolate treats balanced on their kid than the lecture itself.

 

There was a notepad and pen on the bed beside her but he hadn’t seen her pick it up to make notes in a while. He was content to lie beside her, back propped against the headboard as he read through the case notes and what little information Monroe’s uncle had been able to turn up. It was easy enough to tune out the lecture, though Adalind had offered to put her earphones in.

 

‘Find anything?’ she asked quietly when the lecture finished, cutting off the Q&A session at the end that didn’t interest her.

 

Nick shook his head. ‘The names Monroe gave us helped but I can’t seem to find anyone on the list or any family members on the list who fit the description of our victim.’

 

‘I’m surprised,’ Adalind admitted. ‘Powerful hexenbiests tend to make a name for themselves in certain circles – plenty of people know my name – but this one seems to have avoided notice.’

 

Nick put the Missing Person’s report he was comparing to the victim down and frowned over at her. He knew that Adalind had made some enemies, knew that she conferred with some seriously shady people on occasion though that was largely in her past now. The idea that the kind of notoriety she’d found was a common occurrence where hexenbiests were concerned surprised him.

 

Then again, so far he’d only associated with powerful hexenbiests trying to kill him and it wasn’t exactly a long list. ‘What do you mean?’

 

‘My mother made a name for herself because she wanted power, she made sure everyone who could give her that power knew her name and what she could do for them in return. Sean’s mother drew the eye of the King and the Royals much the same way and you know how I got their attention. Hexenbiests tend to play in the big leagues, it’s been years since I met one that lived a boring 9-5 existence.’

 

It was easy enough to imagine a hexenbiest wreaking havoc and causing problems but Nick had to agree, judging on his encounters alone, it was hard to imagine one just living life day to day without causing some kind of trouble. ‘Those two you used to work with?’ Nick asked.

 

Adalind nodded. ‘Why do you think they left me for last?’ She looked over at him. ‘They were nothing special, they came to work did the job – did it well – but they weren’t making waves. They wanted power but they wanted it quietly, they were ambitious but it was confined to the law firm.’

 

‘Yours wasn’t,’ Nick realised. ‘You wanted more.’

 

Adalind shrugged, reaching for some M&Ms only to realise the bowl was empty. She lifted it and waved it in Nick’s direction. He picked up the enormous bag from his nightstand and topped up her bowl without a word.

 

‘My mother was the one who wanted power,’ she said. ‘I already had it, I just wanted Sean.’

 

Nick pulled a face but so did Adalind. He didn’t like the reminder that she’d once been in love (infatuated more like) with his boss and she didn’t like the idea she’d ever been so stupid.

 

‘Judging from the collection in your victim’s library she wasn’t one of the quiet ones, it doesn’t make sense that no one would know her.’

 

Nick shrugged. ‘Maybe we’re not asking the right people.’ It wasn’t like Portland was a small town, there was no way he could talk with everyone who might have come across this missing hexenbiest.

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘You know the wesen community doesn’t work like that. Gossip spreads.’

 

‘We didn’t hear about Black Claw or HW and they’ve clearly been around a while,’ Nick pointed out.

 

Adalind chewed thoughtfully in silence. Eventually, she spoke. ‘But we kind of knew something was going on,’ she reasoned. ‘We were getting attacked a lot, we knew someone was out there we just didn’t know to call them Black Claw.’

 

‘You definitely think it’s Black Claw that’s sending these wesen after us?’

 

Adalind hummed her agreement. ‘It makes more sense than if HW were the ones behind it.’

 

‘Yeah, there’s a definite lack of government goon feeling attached to these guys.’

 

‘And I doubt HW would have let all the deaths slide. No, the attacks are Black Claw but I just don’t understand why HW hasn’t approached us. It would make a hell of a lot more sense to come to us offering explanations and protection than to blackmail Hank and try to weasel information out of Trubel and Josh.’

 

Nick couldn’t argue with that. After his surgery, Josh had still been groggy but his confirmation that the phone call on the burner had been to Trubel had helped them form a timeline to try and track Trubel’s movements. According to Josh, Trubel hadn’t been the one to answer the phone but he assumed she’d been in the area and gotten spooked. It gave them a larger area to try and search and Trubel was good at keeping a low profile but it was something at least.

 

As for Hank, well, Nick still didn’t know what to think. His partner had stayed for brunch but he hadn’t been too happy about it. He’d answered all their questions but his answers had been largely useless. Hank didn’t know anything useful about HW, he didn’t know more than a handful of names and most of those, Nick could have found simply by looking up who Chavez frequently partnered with. Josh had more to give them on the topic of Meisner and so Hank’s information was, for the moment, useless.

 

Which was probably an enormous let down for his partner but Nick didn’t particularly care. He was still mad at Hank for getting himself in that position in the first place and for putting Adalind and their son in danger by not coming to him. Especially after Nick had taken a look at the medical examiner’s report on Hank’s ex-father-in-law and discovered the man had died of a simple heart attack, the natural kind not the kind induced with chemicals.

 

Hank had let a shady government agency play on his fears and it pissed Nick off. Hank should have known better, he should have checked his facts, he shouldn’t have let what Chavez’s group was threatening get to him. He’d been dealing with wesen for years, why had this last time hit so close to home for Hank? The only way Nick was likely to get an answer to that question was if he asked Hank but he wasn’t likely to do that any time soon. He needed to be angry at Hank for a little longer yet. He needed to work back toward trusting his partner, sitting through one awkward brunch didn’t make up for all the lies.

 

And as long as Nick was focusing on the lies Hank had told he didn’t have to dwell on the ones he was telling. Although, did they even count as lies anymore? It wasn’t exactly his fault that Hank had gotten called away by an appointment and hadn’t been there to see Adalind stand up and as such still didn’t know she was pregnant. She’d eaten more than usual at breakfast but Nick doubted it was something Hank had noticed and all the other things Nick had failed to tell him over the last six months could be brushed aside under the banner of not even knowing what the deal was or realising the diminishing trust Hank had for him.

 

Really, brunch that morning had provided sustenance and a nice public place for their confrontation with Hank and not much else.

 

‘Oh my god,’ Adalind said suddenly, sitting up as fast as she could with their son taking up space and her feet in the air – which really wasn’t all that fast and resulted in the bowl of M&Ms tumbling everywhere.

 

‘What?’ Nick asked with alarm.

 

‘Henrietta!’

 

‘What?’

 

‘Henrietta!’ Adalind repeated, like that would suddenly clear things up.

 

‘Who or what is Henrietta?’

 

‘A hexenbiest,’ Adalind clarified. ‘She’s a powerful hexenbiest but she doesn’t play well with others.’

 

‘That describes every hexenbiest I’ve ever fought,’ Nick pointed out. ‘Including you.’

 

Adalind gave him a scathing look but didn’t seem offended. ‘She’s an old friend of Sean’s mother, you can’t find her if you don’t know where she is, she hides herself behind a bunch of different spells and protections.’

 

‘Alright.’

 

‘I didn’t even think about her.’

 

‘Why?’

 

Adalind shrugged, shuffling herself around on the bed as though she was actually going to clean up the M&Ms she’d just spilt everywhere. Nick waved away her attempts and got up himself to clean up the mess.

 

‘She creeps me out,’ she explained. ‘I haven’t thought about her in years but now that I am thinking about her, there are a few things I’d like to ask her about.’

 

‘Like what?’ Nick asked, he was on his hands and knees scooping up tiny chocolates from under the edge of the bed so his voice was a little muffled but Adalind had no trouble hearing him.

 

‘She has this protection that means her address, all of her contact information gets scrambled as soon as the intended person stops looking at it.’

 

Nick popped up from beneath the bed. ‘It what?’

 

‘Gets all scrambled,’ Adalind explained. ‘Like this.’

 

She picked up the notepad and paper and quickly wrote out Nick & Adalind Burkhardt. Before Nick could comment on her choice of words the letters rearranged themselves, sliding all over the paper to make nonsense. Some of the letters even changed as he was watching, the “h” in his name seemed to grow and twist until it was a lower case “k”.

 

Intrigued, Nick looked up at Adalind (in the back of his mind, far, far back was a little voice that pointed out her choice of wording might have had something to do with the fact that he was on his knees before her holding something precious in his hand – the fact that at this point her idea of precious was candy coated chocolate was irrelevant). ‘She can do that for her address?’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘And her phone number.’

 

‘Could you?’

 

This time Adalind shrugged. ‘I don’t know, it’s easy to do it with something I’ve written directly, like this,’ she held up the notepad. ‘I’m not sure if I could do it for every time our address is mentioned.’

 

‘But if you could,’ Nick hazarded.

 

‘If I could, then we could make sure no one found us, no one we didn’t invite anyway.’

 

‘Do you think this Henrietta would be willing to teach you?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Adalind replied thoughtfully. ‘She’s loyal to Sean and his mother – in her own way – but she’s got no love for the Royals and she’d be helping us hide from them.’

 

‘Would she tell Renard if you came to her looking for help?’

 

‘I don’t think so.’ Adalind considered it for a moment and he went back to scooping up stray M&Ms. ‘She’s discreet, I remember that much.’

 

‘And you think she might be able to help us identify our hexenbiest victim?’

 

‘It’s worth a shot.’

 

Apparently, that shot had to be taken the next morning, bright and early and with no warning phone call. Nick didn’t mind, he’d been up for a few hours any way and it wasn’t like they had any big plans for their Sunday. He just hadn’t thought he’d be spending it plotting with a powerful hexenbiest – not one that wasn’t Adalind anyway.

 

He drove while Adalind directed him from the passenger seat with her eyes closed. She said if she opened them it was harder to get the directions right. She’d told him the address and while he had a fairly good idea of where that was, finding the exact location wasn’t going to be a matter of putting it in the SatNav in her car – he’d tried, it hadn’t gone well.

 

The house Adalind directed him to was big and old and surprisingly unimposing. It somehow managed to blend in with the other houses on the street while at the same time screaming it held more than the eye could see. The gloomy colours of the house were understated and while the few people out early walking their dogs (or just themselves) passed by the house without seeming to notice, it gave off a feeling that was ominous enough for Nick to hesitate before he took the steps up to the porch.

 

Adalind seemed amused by his assessment of the house but he had to wonder if the creepy feeling setting his Grimm instincts on fire would lurk around their loft if they put the same protections around it. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep comfortably if that were the case. And what about their son? If he took after Nick would he feel the same creepy feeling? Nick didn’t want to turn their home into something even their son was uncomfortable living in.

 

The uncomfortable feeling didn’t ease when Adalind reached out to knock but it did ease once they were inside.

 

The woman who answered the door was tall, dark and just as intimidating as her house. She smiled at Adalind and though she couldn’t have known they were coming she didn’t look surprised to see them. She greeted Adalind like an old friend, chivvying them inside with a warmth that seemed at odds with her scary hexenbiest persona. Once they were inside she looked him up and down with an intensity that left Nick feeling violated.

 

‘A Grimm, Adalind?’ she laughed. ‘What would your mother say?’

 

‘Oh she’s turning in her grave,’ Adalind replied cheerfully.

 

‘Where my mother put her,’ Nick felt compelled to add.

 

This drew another laugh from Henrietta. ‘Oh, I like this.’

 

Henrietta took them through to what seemed to be a sitting room (or it would have been if they were still a thing) and offered them tea and coffee. While she poured the tea, Nick explained he was searching for the identity of a hexenbiest who had been murdered approximately six months before and that he and Adalind were interested in any help she could offer Adalind in protecting their home.

 

Henrietta’s only price for helping them was she wanted to know their story. It was a strange request but an easy one to comply with. It helped that as they told their story, interrupting each other to give their own perspective, they seemed to be proving something to Henrietta. Nick didn’t know exactly what but it seemed like the more they talked the more they were satisfying some curiosity for her. He thought about asking but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He didn’t much care what another hexenbiest thought of their relationship or what exactly she was getting from their story aside from the fact that they were rocking a cliché as enemies turned lovers.

 

What mattered was whether or not Henrietta could help Adalind protect their home and offer insight into the identity of the dead hexenbiest.

 

She could do the first but not the second. Even with the names of the books and pictures of the room and the victim, Henrietta had no idea who the woman was. ‘Are you sure she was a local?’

 

Nick shook his head. ‘We don’t know anything about her. That might not even be her secret room, she might have just stumbled across it or have been led in there.’

 

Henrietta quirked a brow. ‘That’s a lot of questions and possibilities and so few answers.’

 

Nick gave a rueful smile, ‘That about sums up this case.’

 

‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you.’ Henrietta sounded genuine and Nick supposed the fact that he was looking to solve a hexenbiest’s murder probably helped her overlook the fact that he was a Grimm. Though his turning up with Adalind and the obvious fact that he loved her was probably enough on its own.

 

‘Do you know anything about an organisation known as Black Claw?’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Hadrian’s Wall?’

 

There was a definite grimace on her face at that. Strange that she’d heard of the government organisation and not the rebel group looking to out wesen and claim the power of the Royals for wesen. From all that Adalind had told him about Henrietta, she seemed the ideal target for Black Claw. Hard to imagine they wouldn’t want someone who disliked the Royals on their side. She was smart, though, and Nick had no trouble believing that her desire to look out for herself and no one else kept her from taking part in any political movements.

 

‘I was approached,’ Henrietta said simply. ‘I declined the invitation.’

 

‘Can I ask why?’

 

‘Why did you say no?’ Henrietta countered, which to Nick was explanation enough.

 

Nick’s cell phone interrupted them then and Henrietta shooed him through to another room to take the call, telling him she would teach Adalind what she needed to know while he was on the line with what turned out to be Wu.

 

‘You’ve found something,’ Nick guessed without preamble.

 

‘Not a thing.’ For someone ringing with apparently bad news, Wu sounded far too happy. ‘In this case, that’s actually a good thing.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘I think I might have a lead on our victim,’ Wu explained. ‘I nearly missed it, I probably would have if I hadn’t been looking for something just like it.’

 

‘And what is it?’

 

‘There’s a discrepancy in the transition dates of ownership on the manor,’ Wu explained. ‘There’s a thirteen-month gap of ownership back in the 1850s, the house belonged to the Daring family until May of 1854 but every record I can find says that it wasn’t actually purchased again until June of 1855 by the Bauer family. There’s a notice of sale in 1854 but no paperwork on who bought it – unless you happen to cross reference the movement of funds out of the back from that same year.’

 

Nick didn’t see how the purchase (or lack of) of the house a century and a half before was relevant but he assumed Wu had a point. ‘Okay…’

 

‘If I’m right the house was brought for those months by the Dobrini family, I think they’re the ones who must have built the secret room because I followed the Dobrini family down the generations looking for someone alive now who might know about a secret room – there aren’t actually that many in the family tree, no more than one child per generation (all male) makes for an easy trace -until you get to Linda Dobrini, sixty-seven, of Salem, Massachusetts, reported missing by her son five months ago when she didn’t return home from a trip visiting friends in her hometown of Portland. I’m waiting on the results of dental records and they’ll run the DNA but I’d say it’s her.’

 

‘That’s not nothing,’ Nick pointed out, absurdly pleased with Wu’s discovery even if they were still waiting on the results of the dental records. ‘She’s a bit older than we estimated, though.’

 

Nick could practically see Wu shrugging through the phone. ‘Adalind got me thinking about it,’ Wu explained. ‘Hexenbiest beauty treatments work a lot better than any other. She looked good for her age. Everything else fits, I checked with the friends she was visiting, checked with the hotel (she never actually checked out) and I ran the Dobrini family against the list of collectors Monroe’s uncle gave us and it turns out that in 1934 Michael Dobrini was engaged to marry Eleanor MacPherson (of the MacPhersons on Monroe’s uncle’s list) until she ran away with one of the servants causing an absolute scandal. The news article suggests she ran off with some of the valuables but that some of what she didn’t steal was given to Dobrini as compensation. What do you bet some of those books were part of that trade off?'

 

While he couldn’t argue that it was possible, calling Dobrini their victim based on the assumption that a hexenbiest would know how to age herself well was tenuous at best. Her family owning the house over a century before did not explain why she would be in the secret room six months ago. It didn’t explain why the woman had an entire library and lab set up in a room hidden in a house that she didn’t have regular access to. Of course, the absolute lack of logic in this discovery would make sense of the lack of knowledge of a missing powerful hexenbiest in Portland.

 

‘Have you told Hank all of this?’

 

‘You were my first call.’

 

‘Alright,’ Nick sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. ‘Send me the addresses of her friends here in Portland, I’ll call Hank and we’ll see if any of them know anything about this house and why Linda Dobrini might have been there.’

 

‘You’re going to call Hank, huh?’

 

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘I can do the job.’

 

‘Hey, not judging,’ Wu assured him and Nick could picture him holding up his hands in a placating gesture. ‘Just wondering if that’s a good idea.’

 

‘It’s probably not,’ Nick conceded. ‘I’m still mad at him, his choosing to stick around yesterday does not mean I suddenly trust him but this is the job and I can’t let my personal feelings get in the way.’

 

Wu made a noise that seemed to convey his scepticism. ‘It’s not that I don’t think you can do the job it’s just that if you don’t trust him do you really want him watching your back?’

 

Nick sighed, Wu had a point. ‘I don’t, not really, but I don’t really want him running that phone HW left him or following up on what we have on Trubel either – I need you to do that.’

 

‘Got it,’ Wu replied. ‘Take him with you where you can keep an eye on him and leave me to do the real work.’

 

Nick didn’t think he imagined the note of pride in Wu’s voice and he felt a twinge of guilt over using the man for so many years to do the odd little bits of police work without being honest and upfront with him. Wu was good at his job; he was truly invaluable as a friend and a colleague and Nick regretted that it took him so long to acknowledge that. Knowing how isolated he had felt before he’d let Hank in on his Grimm work, he understood how Wu must have felt knowing he was being left out of the loop but not trusted enough to be let in.

 

Well, the roles had been reversed now. Nick trusted Wu with everything that was going on but he only trusted Hank with the case and even then, only the pieces he needed to know in order to help solve it. The true depth of HW and Black Claw’s possible involvement were something Nick wasn’t keen to explore with Hank just yet. His partner hadn’t had any useful information about the two organisations. As far as Nick could tell, Hank was just a puppet HW was using in an attempt to distract Nick.

 

It wasn’t working. All they had succeeded in doing was isolating Hank and putting Nick even more on guard than he had been before.

 

Of course, that could have been their plan. Isolate Hank from the rest and then what? Harsh as it sounded, Hank had no real value in a war against wesen rebels. If it hadn’t started to affect his performance on the job, Nick wouldn’t have told Hank about wesen in the first place because though he might have adapted to dealing with wesen, with using slightly different interpretations of the law to cope with the new and more powerful threat, he was still just an ordinary guy dealing with things more powerful than him, things that he couldn’t even see unless they wanted him to.

 

For years, Nick had valued the friendship and partnership he had with Hank because it made his job easier, it gave him someone to talk to and discuss his cases with who was right there on the job. But he’d always had Monroe and later Rosalee for that, they’d always offered him a place to relax and talk about his cases and they were always willing to help out or offer him advice when he came across something new he didn’t understand.

 

Hank couldn’t offer him that. In some ways, Wu couldn’t either, but Wu’s ability to roll with the wesen craziness thrown at him seemed more developed than Hank’s. Nick wondered if that was something about the culture Wu had grown up with and the myths he’d grown up hearing or if maybe he was just looking for excuses to leave Hank out of things for a while.

 

Honestly, both Hank and Wu would probably be better off never having known about wesen and Grimms but the constant stream of wesen crimes and wesen adjacent cases that landed on his desk made it almost impossible to keep them from the wesen world.

 

It didn’t stop Nick from imagining what it would be like if it were just him working the police side of things while Adalind, Rosalee and Monroe with Bud’s occasional help worked the wesen side of his cases. It would be a constant battle to keep his partner and Wu from learning the truth, and juggling all the lies would probably get to him, but sometimes it was nice to let the fantasy play out in his head.

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed with Wu’s assessment. ‘That’s exactly what I mean. Josh should be able to give you more information today about Trubel and that phone. I’ll let him know you’re coming and maybe we’ll get lucky.’

 

‘Lucky would be Trubel turning up,’ Wu pointed out.

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘But when are we ever that lucky?’

 

After ending the call with Wu, Nick stuck his head around the door to see if Adalind and Henrietta were finished whatever they were doing. Adalind was sitting with her eyes closed stirring something in a cauldron with slow circles of her finger while Henrietta murmured directions. Nick had no idea what they were doing but they obviously weren’t finished. Henrietta must have felt his gaze because she looked up at him.

 

‘How long?’ he mouthed.

 

She held up five fingers and he nodded, slipping back around the open doorway to make the call to Hank. This one was not nearly as pleasant or as informative as his call with Wu but it needed to be done.

 

‘Nick?’

 

‘Wu got us a possible name,’ Nick replied. ‘Linda Dobrini, was reported missing five months ago. She’s not a local but Wu’s sent me the names of the friends she was visiting. Can you meet me at the first in twenty minutes?’

 

‘Yeah,’ Hank said slowly. ‘Text me the address.’

 

Nick didn’t give him time to say anything else, he simply ended the call and forwarded the list of names and addresses Wu had already sent him on to Hank. That done, he moved back toward the sitting room, pausing to lean in the doorway to watch Adalind as she worked, not wanting to distract her before she was done.

 

Two minutes later her eyes snapped open and she let out a long deep breath, hands coming up to rub her temples. Nick pushed off the doorframe and walked over to her as Henrietta went about bottling whatever it was they’d been cooking up.

 

‘You okay?’

 

Adalind hummed an assurance. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve worked anything that big.’

 

‘Will it work?’

 

‘It will,’ Henrietta confirmed. She handed him two large glass mason jars filled with chalky green powder. ‘Just pour this around the foundations of your home, Adalind will do the rest.’

 

‘Thank you.’ Nick took the jars, tucking them under his arm so he could hold the other out to Adalind to help her up.

 

‘It really was my pleasure.’

 

Henrietta showed them out, bestowing a kiss on Adalind’s cheek and whispering something in her ear that had Adalind frowning in a bemused sort of way. Nick narrowed his eyes but Adalind just smiled at him and led him to the car. Nick cast one last look over his shoulder at Henrietta who offered him a wide smile and a wave. Shaking his head at not just Henrietta but the general weirdness that his life had become, Nick slid into the driver’s seat, waiting for Adalind to secure her seatbelt before he pulled away from the curb.

 

The creepy feeling he’d felt when he first arrived hadn’t registered on the way out. He didn’t know if that was because he had been welcomed into the house and was leaving or if he’d just gotten used to it. Either way, he was slightly more optimistic about living under such protections now. Not that he wouldn’t have done it if the creepy feeling was there to stay, he’d already established he’d do anything to protect his family.

 

‘What did Wu have to say?’

 

‘He got a possible ID on our victim, I’m going to meet up with Hank to interview some of her friends, find out if the missing woman has any connection to the house while we wait for the dental results.’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘We can put up the protections when you get home.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘We can do that.’

 

Hank was waiting for him out front of the first house when they pulled up, the unfamiliar car threw him for a moment but he straightened up when he saw it was Nick behind the wheel. There was a frown on Hank’s face when Nick got out that suggested he was refraining from commenting on the car or the owner.

 

But then an obviously pregnant Adalind circled around the front of the car to take the driver’s seat and any chance that Hank would let it go without comment vanished.

 

‘Man, what the fuck?!’


	23. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While things with Hank go from bad to worse, Nick and Wu look deeper into the mysteries of their case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the wonderful comments and the kudos. There's just one more chapter now before I'm all caught up and then there will be a new one every week.

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 21**

Nick’s optimism about being able to work effectively with Hank while not trusting him didn’t factor in Hank’s reaction to seeing that Adalind was pregnant. Instead of heading up the walk to knock on the door of a woman who might be able to give them answers about just why (possibly) Linda Dobrini was in a house that didn’t belong to her when she died, he was trapped in a car with a surprisingly angry Hank driving to god only knew where so they could hash things out.

 

He wished he could have fled with Adalind but she’d locked the doors on him and given him an amused wave as she drove off.

 

Since his initial incredulous yelp (more of a manly bellow of outrage really), Hank had said exactly two things, ‘Get in the car,’ which had then been followed up by, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?!’ and a loaded silence that was making Nick’s skin crawl.

 

He hadn’t exactly wanted to get in the car with Hank but he wanted to be able to interview this friend and getting into a shouting match with potential blows being exchanged on her front lawn did not seem like the best impression to make on a witness he wanted to give him personal details. So, Nick had gotten in the car after making a token effort to remind Hank they were here to do their job (‘She’s been dead six months, Nick, she’ll keep a dew more hours’ was implied in Hank’s glare).

 

Honestly, Nick was just as mad at Hank but he hadn’t thought kidnapping his partner would solve anything and he was fairly certain that being trapped in the car together, driving aimlessly around Portland without speaking, wasn’t going to achieve much more than fuelling the tension between them. Hank’s jaw was clenched tight and his hands were gripping the steering wheel tight enough there was a genuine worry he’d crack it.

 

And still he hadn’t spoken a word since ordering Nick into the car.

 

Nick was really beginning to regret getting in. He could handle loud confrontations, he could handle punches being thrown and sharp words being exchanged, hell he’d take fake civility over silence any day. You couldn’t work with silence, it just hung heavy in the air, choking the life out of the people stuck in it and, and –

 

He’d potentially been spending too much time around Adalind because his thoughts were starting to take on that slightly hysterical rambling nature of her freak outs – the ones he found really adorable and made him want to kiss her which usually solved the problem of her freak out even if it didn’t address the cause.

 

Somehow, he didn’t think mentioning that to Hank would improve matters.

 

‘Are we just going to sit here in silence until we run out of gas?’ Nick broke the silence with what he felt was a genuine concern. Hank didn’t seem to have any particular place in mind for their destination and he also didn’t seem to be all that focused on the road.

 

They weren’t travelling that fast, really, Nick was certain he’d survive having to throw himself out of a moving car on a residential street. Of course, he’d have to call Monroe or Wu to come and get him because Adalind would leave him there for Hank to come back and collect reminding him (quite rightly) that he couldn’t avoid Hank forever because they actually did need to work together and interviewing Dobrini’s friend was potentially the only way they were going to get more information about why the woman had been there and if she was connected to Black Claw.

 

‘I’m thinking about it,’ Hank said tightly.

 

‘Fine,’ Nick snapped. ‘But we do actually have a job to do, we have a body to identify and a murder to solve, if you could get over this sometime soon that would be helpful.’

 

Hank shot him a withering look. ‘Get over it?’ he snarled. ‘Nick you’re dating Adalind! Pregnant Adalind! Jesus, do you even know who the father is?’

 

‘Of course I know who the father is,’ Nick said with a roll of his eyes. If Hank was going to be that way about it then Nick wasn’t about to add, “He’s sitting right here.”

 

‘You know what she told you,’ Hank countered. ‘That woman tried to kill you, how many times? Five? Six?’

 

Nick thought it was probably more than that but he chose not to say anything.

 

‘She tried to kill Juliette, she almost did kill Wu when he ate those damn cookies and she left me for dead in her bed!’

 

While Nick had often been left sprawled in Adalind’s (their) bed feeling like he might just die it wasn’t because she’d left him for dead, it was more a case of she’d worn him out with one of her hormone driven horny moments and moving was an effort. Again, Hank didn’t need to know that. He could have done without the reminder that Adalind had slept with Hank but that was another thing he didn’t feel like mentioning to Hank.

 

‘I know all of this,’ Nick said calmly.

 

‘Really?’ Hank sounded sceptical. ‘I’m not sure you do. This is Adalind, Nick, Adalind who worked for Renard trying to kill your aunt. Adalind who made deals with the Royals, with anyone who could help her get what she wanted. She slept with Renard and who knows who else just to conceive a baby that would be worth something just so she could get her powers back! That’s the woman you’re letting into your bed! The woman who poisoned your girlfriend and your friends, poisoned you when you got in the way of her attempt to kill your aunt and actively tried to _kill_ you multiple times for herself and her bosses.

 

‘Man, what the fuck were you thinking?! Because I’m getting the impression what you were thinking was basically “hot blonde, great fuck”.’

 

Nick opened his mouth to contradict that last statement (couldn’t actually contradict most of the rest) but Hank apparently wasn’t done.

 

‘Adalind lies and manipulates,’ Hank pointed out in a flat voice, like this was his final say and that was all that should matter to Nick. ‘She does whatever she needs to get by, don’t fool yourself into thinking she cares about you, that she trusts you, don’t for one second think she could love you, because that’s not Adalind. Come on, Nick, I thought you were smarter than that.’

 

The whole time Hank had been raging against Adalind, Nick had been surprisingly calm. He was mad at Hank for so many reasons already that being angry at him for disrespecting Adalind just seemed like a waste of time. He knew what was true of Hank’s words and what wasn’t. He was very aware of the past he and Adalind shared and he knew how she felt about all the things she’d done. He and Adalind had never really lied to each other. Even when she’d been telling him she liked Hank and was just trying to have a nice dinner, her lies had been said with a grin that they both knew meant they weren’t true. Nick knew what Adalind was, knew who she was and he wasn’t about to justify his choices to Hank. He hadn’t even justified them to Monroe or Rosalee – well except maybe explaining how the whole thing had started and even then, it had been more explanation for sleeping with her than justification.

 

He wouldn’t waste his time explaining things to Hank, they weren’t his business and even if they’d still been on friendlier terms, Nick wouldn’t have wasted his breath justifying something that had nothing to do with Hank. Hank didn’t know Adalind, he’d never really known Adalind because those first few months he hadn’t been a part of Nick’s Grimm life. Yes, he’d been caught in the middle but he hadn’t known what Adalind was doing, hadn’t understood. Hank still didn’t understand and Nick was not going to explain it to him.

 

He wasn’t going to point out how for every time Adalind had tried to kill him he’d tried to kill her. He wasn’t going to try and explain how stripping her of her powers had been like killing her in its own way. Hank didn’t need to know that his taking her powers had also stripped her of her family and the man she’d thought cared about her. Hank likely wouldn’t care, but it could sway him to understand but Nick didn’t need him to understand, Hank just had to accept it.

 

So, no, Nick didn’t bother to explain about Adalind’s choices or the ones he’d made to reach this point and form a strong relationship with her, one that he knew was, without doubt, stronger than his relationship with Juliette had ever been – and in just a few short months.

 

But there were things he would tell Hank.

 

‘I don’t care what you think, Hank, it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to change things between me and Adalind. It might change things between us but I think you already managed that when you lied to me for months about being blackmailed by a shady branch of the government.’

 

‘I already explained that to you,’ Hank growled. ‘You know why I did what I did.’

 

‘I really don’t,’ Nick contradicted. ‘It makes no sense, Hank. I looked at the ME’s report, I know your ex-father-in-law died of a heart attack, I know there wasn’t anything suspicious about it. You’re a good cop, Hank, I don’t for one moment think you would have taken their threats seriously without evidence to back it up and a couple of stalkerish photos don’t constitute enough of a threat to have you doing everything asked of you. We’re not going to talk about my relationship with Adalind because that’s none of your business but you lying to us and passing on personal information, that’s my business, that’s all of our business, because you betrayed our trust.’

 

Hank smacked his palms on the steering wheel in frustration. ‘I told you - ’

 

‘You told us nothing!’ Nick insisted. ‘You’re leaving something out, something that would at least explain why the hell you didn’t come to me in the first place. Christ, Hank, you didn’t even have to come to me, you could have talked to Monroe or Trubel or even fucking Renard but you didn’t and I don’t understand why. Why would you betray us? I don’t understand what made you think it was okay to keep this from us and just expect us to keep blindly trusting you.’

 

‘God damnit!’ Hank swore emphatically a few times, pulling in to the parking lot of a convenience store. His movement were sharp and hard as he put the car in park, yanked on the hand break and then forced the door open before stepping out onto the asphalt and slamming the door again.

 

Apparently, they were going with potential public brawl. Nick shoved open his own door and got out to face Hank. Hank had his head tilted back, eyes closed and he was breathing hard with his anger. Nick, in comparison, was still perfectly calm and stood in front of the car watching his partner with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. It was weird to be the calm one, especially given the topic of their conversation but Nick was feeling particularly uncaring right now about Hank’s problems, he was smarting a bit from the insinuation that his relationship with Adalind was actually any of Hank’s business, but he was nonplussed by Hank’s unjustified anger.

 

‘Do you have any idea how hard it is being your partner?’ Hank asked in a surprisingly calm tone.

 

Thrown by the sudden calm, Nick just shrugged. What was he supposed to say to that? He thought being Hank’s partner came with a lot of difficulties, especially at the moment, so he wasn’t about to make any snide remarks just yet, better to wait and see where the hell Hank was going with this.

 

‘You see things no one else can see, Nick, and we have to deal with a lot of weird shit because of that.’

 

Still unsure if Hank was getting to a point that would help him understand, Nick stayed silent.

 

‘Don’t get me wrong, I like knowing what the hell is going on, I never want to go back to being that mess I was after I saw that doctor change his face, but do you have any idea how hard it is to deal with this shit on a daily basis?’

 

That stupid question forced a response out of Nick. ‘Yes,’ he said curtly. ‘I think I do.’

 

‘No,’ Hank countered. ‘You really don’t. This is easy for you,’ Hank said. ‘You’re a Grimm, Nick, it’s literally in your blood to deal with this stuff, you get extra skills, better reflexes and healing and just a general implied preparedness that the rest of us don’t have.’

 

‘And this explains you lying to me how?’ Nick demanded.

 

‘I don’t know that it does,’ Hank failed to clarify. ‘I’m just saying that you take all this wesen shit and just deal with it. You and Monroe and Rosalee just take whatever the hell these guys throw at you and you just deal with it.’

 

‘I thought you did too,’ Nick frowned. ‘Is this your way of telling me you can’t handle the wesen aspect of our cases?’

 

‘No,’ Hank let out a frustrated breath. ‘I just, you need to understand how hard it is to stand next to you and know that some monster is possibly going to kill me and I won’t even see it coming.’

 

‘You’re mad because you’re not a Grimm?’ Nick hoped he sounded as confused as he felt because as far as he knew this had never been a problem for Hank before.

 

‘No, that’s not what I mean.’

 

‘Then what the hell do you mean?’ Nick demanded. ‘I have no fucking idea what you’re trying to tell me, Hank, because nothing you’ve said so far today is building back that trust you so completely destroyed by lying to us all.’

 

‘I don’t know how to explain it.’ Hank was losing some of his calm now, building up to being angry and frustrated and Nick was right there with him because he didn’t get it, he didn’t understand what Hank was trying to say, didn’t understand what that had to do with his being a Grimm or the wesen cases in their work. If Hank needed a break from the wesen weirdness why the hell had he agreed to spy on Nick and their friends for an organisation set up to deal with wesen threats? Why had he let HW talk him into something that would connect him deeper to the wesen world and not come to Nick for advice or even let him know that he needed a break a vacation?

 

The last time Hank had taken a vacation they’d had to literally shove him out the door and remind him not to come back until his weeks were up. That was well into the wesen weirdness surrounding their life so it wasn’t like he’d been feeling any kind of strain to do with the job then, so why now? Why was Hank turning around now and trying to tell him that it was all a lot to handle, that maybe it was too much to handle?

 

‘I always thought you handled the wesen aspect of our cases well,’ Nick ventured. ‘I thought you liked knowing what was going on and being a part of it.’

 

‘I do,’ Hank insisted. ‘It’s just…’ he trailed off and Nick just looked at him, feeling absurdly like he was rehashing an old fight with Juliette. ‘Maybe as much as I want to help with the wesen cases, I’m not really cut out for it. Maybe that’s why wesen have stayed hidden for so long, maybe ordinary people just aren’t made to cope.’

 

‘Bullshit,’ Nick snapped. ‘That’s crap, Hank, and now you’re just making excuses.’

 

Hank glared at him. ‘I’m not making excuses.’

 

‘Yes, you are,’ Nick said. ‘I don’t believe for one second this is about you being sick of dealing with the wesen weirdness, I mean, sure, some part of it might be that but if it is, why now? What set you off? What the hell happened to make you take a step back and think that you couldn’t do this anymore but that handing information over to HW was okay? Because that’s the part I’m really having trouble with. I get that wesen and Grimms and all the shit we deal with might be too much for some people – why the hell do you think I broke up with Juliette? – but you’ve been coping fine, things made sense to you once you knew, so no, I’m not buying it. Something else is going on and I don’t understand why you’re not telling me, why you’d rather lie and hide things than ask for help.’

 

‘ _You_ broke up with Juliette?’

 

‘Not the thing we’re focusing on, Hank,’ snapped Nick. ‘This is about you. If you wanted out of the whole wesen thing all you had to do was say the word. I don’t need a partner, I’m fine on my own with Adalind, Monroe and Rosalee to back me up when shit gets weird. I’m sure Renard would happily split us up – it’ll probably give him more room to spy on me and attempt to manipulate me. Say the word Hank and you can have a break from the weirdness.’

 

‘I don’t need a break,’ but Hank didn’t seem all that sure of his own words. ‘That’s not what this is about.’

 

‘Well it’s the only thing you’ve said that makes any kind of sense even if it makes none at all.’

 

‘Nick - ’

 

‘No,’ Nick said. ‘Until you can explain what the hell is going through your head, we’re done. You pulled me off a perfectly good lead to have a conversation about my love life and who I sleep with. Your head’s not in the game, Hank, and if you don’t sort yourself out, I will go to Renard.’

 

He turned his back on Hank, pulled out his phone and called Monroe. It wasn’t exactly professional but at least Monroe wouldn’t drag him away from an interview to throw a tantrum. It took thirty minutes for Monroe to collect him and take him back to the address of Dobrini’s friend.

 

‘You sure I should be here?’ Monroe asked, when they stopped on the porch so Nick could ring the doorbell.

 

‘Better you than Hank,’ Nick replied.

 

The woman who answered the door looked to be in her late fifties, hair short and grey and she was wearing slippers with her jeans and sweater. She took one look at Nick and frowned, tilting her head and then woging when she realised what had obviously triggered her sense that something wasn’t quite right about him. She was a hexenbiest, Nick should have been expecting it. Still, he had more understanding of hexenbiests than any other Grimm alive (and probably dead) so he just nodded at her.

 

If she was surprised to find a Grimm standing on her doorstep she was more surprised to find that he was accompanied by a blutbad.

 

‘Can I help you?’ Sonya Aleman asked.

 

‘I hope so,’ Nick replied with a rueful smile. ‘I’m Detective Nick Burkhardt, my associate Monroe, we’re here to ask you some questions about your friend Linda Dobrini.’

 

‘A Grimm and a blutbad want to ask me about a hexenbiest’s disappearance?’ He didn’t blame her for being sceptical and she didn’t make any move like she was going to let them in.

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘That’s what we want. A body was discovered a few days ago that we have reason to believe is your friend. Can we come in?’

 

Her eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re really here to ask about Linda?’

 

‘If it helps,’ Monroe said. ‘I’m married to a fuchsbau and he’s got a hexenbiest for a girlfriend.’

 

Taken aback, the woman stepped aside and motioned them inside. ‘Really? You married a fuchsbau?’ Monroe nodded. ‘What’s that like?’

 

‘Like any marriage, I guess.’

 

‘Probably better than my three,’ the woman laughed. She directed them through to the living room and motioned them toward the couch. She took a seat on the cosy armchair which had knitting draped over one arm and studied them. ‘You said you found a body?’

 

Nick nodded, bringing up a picture on his phone of the dried-out form and showing it to the woman. He figured – correctly – that she wouldn’t be squeamish or worried about something so insignificant as a picture of a dead body.

 

‘Could this be your friend Linda?’ he asked, showing her another photo from a different angle.

 

She shrugged. ‘It could be, it’s hard to tell.’

 

‘Can you tell us when you last saw your friend?’

 

Sonya thought about it for a moment. ‘It must be about seven months, maybe only six,’ she said eventually. ‘We didn’t see each other regularly when she came for a visit, we didn’t always get along – a hexenbiest doesn’t tend to play well with others.’

 

‘I know.’

 

‘None of us even knew she was missing until the police turned up and started asking questions.’

 

‘Her son didn’t call you when he first realised she hadn’t come home?’

 

‘Ha!’ she scoffed. ‘I’m surprised he even noticed she was missing. The only thing Mitch ever cared about was money and power and Linda might have had a lot of the latter but she was never interested in the former.’

 

‘She didn’t care about money?’ Nick clarified.

 

‘She never really needed to,’ Sonya explained. ‘Her family is old money.’

 

‘Her family is from Portland originally?’

 

Sonya nodded. ‘They moved east when Sonya was sixteen, they said it was for business but I think there was some sort of scandal there. Sonya came back for school and then she used to come back to visit.’

 

‘Were her visits kept quiet?’

 

‘God no,’ Sonya scoffed. ‘Everyone knew when Linda was back in town.’

 

‘See you say that but I’ve spoken to two different hexenbiests here in Portland and neither of them have ever heard of Linda Dobrini.’

 

‘We keep to ourselves,’ Sonya tried to explain it off.

 

‘You really don’t,’ Nick contradicted, covering Monroe’s incredulous snort.

 

‘Well maybe we’re all more talk than power,’ Sonya conceded. ‘We never made much of a splash in society.’

 

‘That’s the impression I’m getting. No one knew anything about a missing hexenbiest here in town – and I’ve asked around – and no one could tell me anything about where she was found.’

 

‘Where was she found?’ Sonya asked. ‘And how did she die?’

 

‘I can’t discuss the how, I’m sorry, but I’d like to talk about the where. Do you know why Linda would have been at the old manor on - ’

 

‘Ugh, that old thing,’ Sonya said with a roll of her eyes, cutting Nick off. ‘That place was her family’s pride and joy and they didn’t even own it anymore.’

 

Nick pulled up another photo on his phone and showed a picture of the big old house to Sonya. ‘This house?’

 

‘Yes, that one. Her family owned it for a year centuries ago but they never got over it. When we were kids Sonya used to dare us to sneak in but she was the only one who ever really cared enough to go in.’

 

‘Did she ever tell you why she wanted to go in there?’

 

Sonya shrugged. ‘I always assumed it was the money, the reminder that her family used to own it.’

 

‘That was long before her time, though,’ Nick pointed out. ‘I’m surprised she even knew her family used to own it.’

 

‘You’d have to know the family to understand,’ Sonya remarked dryly.

 

They talked some more but Sonya didn’t have any explanation for why Linda would have been at the house or why she’d been so interested in the place. She also didn’t have any idea what the business card or the torn sheet of paper with the claw marks on it had to do with anything. Nick was beginning to wonder if Black Claw was even present in Portland. HW seemed to think they were a threat, enough of one that they’d (successfully) attempted to bring out the Grimm in Josh, kidnapped Trubel and allegedly coerced Hank into spying on his friend the Grimm and his wesen friends.

 

Yet, as much of a threat as they apparently were, short of a few easily handled surprise attacks on him and Adalind, Black Claw largely seemed to be a big deal over nothing. It made no sense to Nick for HW to be so set on knowing what was going on in his life, if the group they were apparently targeting hadn’t made enough of an influence in Portland that even the shadiest of shady friends of friends that Bud always gossiped with (and about) had never even heard of them.

 

It just really wasn’t selling Nick on the need to do something about them when no one he’d talked to had ever heard of them and were therefore living their lives as ordinarily and sometimes as boringly as before.

 

Nick was sure he could have carried on for months, years even, without having anything to do with Black Claw outside of the occasional scuffle and really, having to kill a few lousy wesen every now and then because they were making an attempt on his or Adalind’s life was pretty much par for the course in his life anyway.

 

He was not getting what the big deal was and with Josh having no real idea, Trubel still MIA and Hank being an untrustworthy mystery, Nick just wasn’t seeing any reason to be concerned. Honestly, the worst part was that he was having so much difficulty solving one hexenbiest’s murder because he couldn’t figure out why she was where she was when she died (the secret library thing they got but not the why it had never been moved when the family sold the house). It didn’t help that the report from the initial investigation when she disappeared was thorough and extensive (he assumed money had come into play there somehow) and the detectives assigned the case had exhaustively followed every lead and come up empty.

 

It did ease the irritation when they couldn’t come up with anything either.

 

After finishing up the interview with Sonya, Monroe drove them both to the Spice Shop. Wu was already there when they arrived and he did not look impressed when he told them about the fancy phone HW had bestowed on Hank.

 

‘It requires a thumb print to answer when it rings,’ Wu explained. ‘It’s set up for Hank’s prints but I haven’t been able to get hold of him and so when it rang the first time I couldn’t verify my identity to answer it.’

 

‘It rang more than once?’ Adalind asked, looking up from the book she was reading – it was written in French.

 

‘Yeah,’ Wu confirmed. ‘They were strangely persistent. It rang six times this morning.’

 

‘Maybe they think Hank’s dead,’ she said with a shrug.

 

‘Adalind,’ Rosalee scolded, though she seemed more amused than annoyed.

 

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘Nick’s pissed at Hank still, I can tell, its currently perfectly acceptable for me to be dismissive of his wellbeing.’

 

This time Rosalee actually laughed, not because the idea of Hank being killed was amusing but because the way Adalind said it so matter of fact said she was partially kidding but also mad at Hank on his behalf. He elected not to tell her about certain parts of their conversation until they got home, lest she decide murdering him herself was a good course of action. He did explain the basics of their argument though.

 

‘I don’t get it,’ Wu said when he was done. ‘Is he saying he doesn’t want to work with us anymore?’

 

‘And what does that have to do with betraying us to Hadrian’s Wall?’ Rosalee wanted to know.

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick answered Wu. ‘And as far as I can tell, nothing,’ he added to Rosalee. ‘The whole thing made no sense, he’s still lying to us, still hiding something. I thought we could work around our issues, keep it professional, but he ruined that hope by dragging me away from work to scold me about my love life.’

 

Adalind’s lips twitched like she wanted to smile but she wisely kept a lid on it. He was not above pointing out that she’d abandoned him to that conversation by hightailing it away from the scene in her car with a sarcastic and cheerful wave to say goodbye.

 

‘We really need to find Trubel,’ Rosalee murmured. ‘I think she’s the only one who can tell us what’s really going on here.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘Any luck finding her?’

 

Wu shook his head. ‘Too much footage came through and she’s good, she knows how to hide. I don’t know if that’s a skill she’s always had or something she’s picked up working for HW but she clearly knows how to avoid being caught on surveillance cameras now. It’s like trying to find a ghost.’

 

Nicked nodded. ‘Do you want to come with me to interview the rest of Dobrini’s friends. I’m just not feeling optimistic that Hank will get his head out of his ass long enough to do the job.’

 

‘I’m getting that impression,’ Wu drawled. ‘Does he seriously think ignoring all the wesen weirdness is going to make his life easier?’

 

Nick kissed Adalind briefly on the lips to say goodbye and followed Wu out of the shop. ‘No idea. I thought knowing how crazy he got before he knew the truth and the fact that you committed yourself to a mental health clinic would have been hint enough that you can’t un-see this stuff.’

 

‘I certainly don’t think I’ll ever be able to ignore it again.’

 

‘Yeah, again, really sorry about the whole making you think you were crazy thing.’

 

Wu shrugged, unlocking the doors to his squad car. ‘I’m over it, the answers were almost crazier than my imaginings so it makes up for it.’

 

Nick just laughed, slipping into the passenger seat. It was nice to know Wu was just as baffled by Hank’s behaviour as he was.


	24. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 22**

In the end, Nick found himself seated across from Hank at his partner’s kitchen table with too many empty bottles between them. Before the alcohol consumption got a little high he could have told you all the steps that had lead them to this point but he couldn’t have said exactly how it had all happened. The more they drank the fuzzier the details were and he knew he was going to have to call Adalind to come and get him because as much as he hated the idea of dragging her out of bed he liked the idea of crashing on Hank’s couch even less.

 

It started in Renard’s office. As much as he didn’t want to, Nick had to acknowledge that with Renard in the dark on their concerns about Black Claw and HW, it was harder to do the job effectively. As much of a controlling, manipulative asshole as he was, Renard was used to juggling different sides, he was used to playing everyone to get what he wanted and as he had always wanted his father’s power and seemed to think the best way to achieve that was to have a Grimm on his side, Nick had come to the conclusion (after much discussion with Adalind and his friends) that Renard would, in this case, be an asset.

 

Honestly, he’d assumed that despite their usual game of lying to each other, that Renard would in fact know something about either one of the groups. So Nick was taken somewhat by surprise when Renard dropped the report he was reading about Linda Dobrini to stare at Nick in surprise.

 

‘What?’

 

And perhaps there was some alarm in there as well.

 

‘I’m currently being attacked by a wesen group known as Black Claw and potentially stalked for recruitment by a shady government agency called Hadrian’s Wall,’ Nick repeated more succinctly than his first explanation. ‘And, uh, I think the Royals are still sending assassins after me but given everything else that’s going on I’m not all that worried about them.’

 

‘This is bad.’

 

‘That may be an understatement,’ Nick conceded. ‘Trubel’s missing, Josh was hospitalised and Hank has turned spy.’

 

‘What?’

 

Nick started from the beginning, laying out everything they knew and leaving out only the bits of the story specific to Adalind. He laid it all out explaining how the attacks had started, how he hadn’t really thought much of them, how Hank had been acting distant but as Nick had been too he hadn’t been worried and he told Renard about the two cases that had links to this Black Claw (though they weren’t actually sure how) and eventually after a solid fifteen minutes without interruption he finished up explaining that Josh was in hospital newly a Grimm and that Hank was acting so strange that they’d ended up fighting in front of a convenience store.

 

Understandably, Renard had a lot of questions and Nick answered them as best he could.

 

‘Do we know what they want?’ Renard, of course, started with the hard ones.

 

Nick shook his head. ‘The information we have is spotty at best. We know that HW is recruiting Grimms – and apparently people they can bring the latent Grimm out in – and we know that they’re fighting Black Claw but, honestly, as far as we can tell Black Claw isn’t a thing here in Portland. No one seems to have heard of them and aside from these two cases (which could be only tangentially related) we have nothing that links this group to any homicide or any crime at all.’

 

‘But this HW is sure they’re something we need to worry about?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick admitted. ‘We’re not even getting half the story, just bits and pieces – we really need to find Trubel.’

 

Renard nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out but these two groups aren’t something my sources are turning up.’

 

‘I know,’ Nick agreed. ‘We can’t find anything on them. I don’t know, maybe we’ve just been so focused on the royal families?’

 

‘Not that focused,’ Renard said dryly. Then changing the subject slightly, the Captain asked, ‘What do you want to do with Hank?’

 

Nick shrugged. ‘We need to keep working together, there’s something going on there and I’m not sure I trust him entirely at the moment but he’s my partner, if we stick together, maybe sooner or later he’ll let something slip.’

 

‘You’re willing to work with him?’

 

Nick nodded, he might have been angry enough the day before to declare otherwise but after sleeping on it (and talking it through with Adalind like the mature person he actually was) he realised that the best way to get to the bottom of things really was to keep working with Hank like he’d originally tried to do before they’d argued. He’d just man up and apologise to Hank, he might not understand what Hank was going through (because he hadn’t told anyone) but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a good partner, it didn’t mean that when it came down to it, he wasn’t the best person to team up with to solve crimes.

 

Renard frowned, deep in thought. ‘I’ll check in with some people, let me know if you find anything and I’ll let you now if this turns out to be something.’

 

Happy to finally escape Renard’s office, Nick returned to his desk and managed to follow up a few leads before Hank came in for the day. ‘Hey,’ he greeted amicably.

 

Hank nodded, not bothering to make eye contact and that rankled.

 

‘We got confirmation yesterday, dental records say our victim is Linda Dobrini.’

 

‘So, we have a name,’ Hank muttered coolly and Nick’s eyebrows shot up. What was the point of being the bigger person if Hank was acting all surly and cold?

 

‘Wu and I followed up with a couple more of her friends yesterday but they all gave us pretty much the same story, Linda Dobrini was a wealthy woman who stopped into town for visits with old friends regularly, she had no set schedule when she showed up and none of them thought it was weird they hadn’t heard from her in weeks before police came looking. Each of them could only tell us that Dobrini had a strange fixation on the house where her body was found but none of them could tell me why.’

 

Hank bobbed his head to show he was listening but otherwise made no other sign he was following. The calm Nick had been feeling since he woke up started to fall away and the cold anger he’d started to feel yesterday began to build up.

 

‘I think we need to go back to the house and have a better look around,’ Nick continued when it didn’t look like Hank had anything to contribute. ‘There’s got to be something there we missed.’

 

‘Alright,’ Hank spoke finally, ‘let’s go check out the creepy secret room.’

 

For a moment he’d sounded just like the old Hank but sitting in the cold silence of the car proved they were still dealing with secretive and surly Hank. That didn’t stop Nick from trying to make conversation, they might have said some things the day before but the reality of the situation was that they needed to know what was going on with Hank and Nick also wasn’t about to throw away years of friendship on something that by all rights was a stupid misunderstanding and some bad choices.

 

So of course, after ignoring all of Nick’s attempts at conversation, Hank started with a snide, ‘How’s Adalind?’

 

Brow furrowed, Nick glanced over at his partner. Hank’s hands were once again gripped tightly on the steering wheel and he wasn’t looking at Nick but the tension in his shoulders was unmistakeable. Hank was waiting on tenterhooks for a response and the attitude he was seeing caused the anger in Nick to swell again.

 

‘She’s good,’ Nick answered after a deep breath to try and rein in the urge to punch Hank. ‘She’s supposedly spending the day at home grading papers but I figure by lunch curiosity will get the best of her and she’ll end up at the Spice Shop.’

 

Hank snorted but it wasn’t a friendly amusement and Nick felt his anger rapidly climbing to breaking point. The old Hank would have latched on to the comment about grading papers, he would have been curious to know where Adalind was working now that she obviously wasn’t practising law. The old Hank might even have made some sort of comment about her friendship with Rosalee.

 

But that was the old Hank, the new Hank made a crude remark about how the hexenbiest seemed to have him under her spell.

 

‘What is your problem?’ Nick demanded, as Hank pulled into the long driveway of the old manor house.

 

‘My problem?’ Hank asked incredulously. ‘You’re sleeping with Adalind and you seriously think I’m the one with the problem?’

 

‘Why does everything keep coming back to my relationship with Adalind?’ Nick asked, unclipping his seatbelt and stepping out of the car. He waited for Hank to join him before heading toward the front door, not expecting much of an answer from Hank. He understood that Adalind would never be Hank’s favourite person but there were other more important things going on that needed more attention than his relationship with a hexenbiest.

 

‘Because it makes no sense,’ Hank growled. ‘I don’t understand how you go from trying to kill each other to sleeping together!’

 

Nick shrugged, sometimes even he didn’t understand how it had happened. ‘We became friends, it grew from there.’

 

Hank grunted but didn't say anymore and Nick was happy to let the subject drop in favour of actually getting some work done. If he had hopes of getting through the day without arguing they were dashed as soon as Hank asked how he'd even known the library was hidden by a hexenbiest. It wasn't like he'd checked the victims tongue while still at the scene, after all.

 

Learning that Nick had sent a photo to Adalind set Hank off and they spent the rest of the search through the house trading increasingly sharp barbs until Nick feared he would snap and then punch Hank. As hard as he tried, Nick just couldn't tune out the insults.

 

The house wasn't exactly helping things. He and Hank spent hours scouting the whole property from basement (wine cellar included) to attic. The only times Nick felt the search had his whole attention was when he and Hank split up to cover more ground. By the time they were done the silence between them was thick with unspoken rage and they still had no better understanding of what made the house so important that the Dobrini family hadn't moved their secret library when they'd sold the house. It just seemed unrealistic, especially given how difficult travel between towns was a century ago, to leave something so important behind. Which told Nick whatever it was that made the house so special was something to do with the house itself or the location.

 

Which was why, even after a full hour spent searching just the secret library, Nick still wasn't ready to move on. ‘There has to be something here,’ he insisted, ignoring the way Hank rolled his eyes.

 

Why Hank had suddenly regressed to a moody teen Nick didn’t know but it was so unlike him that Nick’s anger burned out and he spent a good minute studying his partner out of the corner of his eye. He still looked like Hank, still dressed the same and from what Nick could tell of his interactions with suspects, victims and people in general, Hank was his ordinary self. The old Hank would have been right there alongside Nick searching every nook and cranny of the secret room hoping to find some clue that could help them make sense of Dobrini’s continued use of the space.

 

This Hank would not have been out of place at a college party. It was disconcerting, honestly, so much so that the last of the anger Nick had been feeling faded and he had to resist the urge to place a hand against Hank’s forehead to check to signs of a fever. He didn’t imagine such an action would go down well, however, so he managed to contain the urge and instead annoyed Hank in a different manner entirely by dropping to all fours to examine every square inch of the floor. He could admit he probably looked stupid but just when he was about to give up he caught a whiff of something that didn’t fit in the tightly sealed room.

 

Nick froze and inhaled deeply through his nose. The floor had been swept clean after CSU were done with it and so he thankfully didn’t end up with lungs full of dust. There was a smell though, something familiar that he couldn’t quite place. The ridiculousness of his being on all fours only increased as he started sniffing around trying to find the source of the smell.

 

He’d have preferred Monroe’s nose but he was worried if he moved he’d lose the smell entirely. Hank moved restlessly, shifting the air and washing away the strangely tangy scent. Which helpfully ruled out the direction of the door where Hank was standing, watching him with his arms crossed.

 

‘Do I even want to know what you’re doing?’ Hank eventually asked, apparently, the absurdity of the situation had peaked Hank’s interest enough that his question hadn’t sounded derisive.

 

‘There’s this smell,’ Nick tried to explain. ‘It’s familiar and it’s coming from somewhere under the floor.’

 

‘Familiar in what way?’

 

Nick looked up at him and furrowed his brow in thought. ‘It’s kind of like a perfume, maybe? Something I’ve smelt before? Or maybe it’s some concoction of Rosalee’s,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not exactly a bad smell just a weird one.’

 

‘Should we call Monroe?’ Hank suggested and he sounded surprisingly civil.

 

‘I don’t know, I -’

 

Quite unexpectedly, Nick fell through the floor. One moment he’d been on his knees looking up and over at Hank, the next he’d moved his right knee half an inch forward and the floor had simply vanished, dropping him eight feet down into the darkness. Something in his left wrist went crunch and three of the fingers on his right hand were ablaze with pain. Thinking about his knees wasn’t something he wanted to do right then, in fact, flopping onto his back to stare up and the ceiling (he couldn’t see anything in the darkness) was about all he could manage. From somewhere above, Hank shouted his name.

 

‘Nick?! Nick!’

 

‘I’m here,’ he yelled back. ‘Wherever here is,’ he added to himself. The logical thing to do would be to fish out his phone so he could flick on its flashlight and get a bit of a look around. But that required moving and he ached in so many places that didn’t really seem like an option just then. Wallowing in self-pity would have suited him better. Unfortunately, it wasn’t practical.

 

His phone rang. Apparently, he still got reception in the dark pit he’d fallen into. Good to know, something that could be added to the list of weirdness surrounding his current circumstances.

 

It was Hank. ‘Are you alright?’ He didn’t sound as concerned as he once might have but Nick let it slide. The pain was already easy in his fingers though he suspected the ache in his knees would be with him for a while.

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick groaned unconvincingly. ‘I’m okay.’

 

‘What happened?’

 

Nick tried to sit up putting the phone on speaker before he flicked on the flashlight and moved it steadily around the room. Room turned out to be a bit on the optimistic side, it was more like a box, a particularly roomy box for sure but it had the same qualities to it that a cupboard or wardrobe might have. It even had a door.

 

‘Hang on, there’s a door down here.’

 

Wincing with every movement, Nick climbed to his feet and painstakingly made his way over to the little wooden door. It came up to his hip and had a huge silver doorknob and a large rusty key hole. On closer inspection, the rust turned out to be dried blood. Nick hesitated before reaching out for the doorknob. Of course, it was locked. Why wouldn’t it be locked?

 

‘The door’s locked,’ he informed Hank. ‘Can you see anything from up there?’ Nick wondered. ‘Like maybe a way to get me out of here?’

 

‘No,’ Hank broke the news without the least bit of concern. ‘It looked like the floor just opened up and -’

 

Hank crashed to the floor behind Nick. While Nick’s decent had been quiet (he’d been too surprised to do more than swear on impact), Hank’s involved an extremely loud yelp and a pained shout when his ankle gave way on landing. Nick looked up but the ceiling was still nothing but a dark black smudge above him.

 

‘Jesus,’ Hank grumbled. ‘The floor just opened right up.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘What were you doing right before you fell?’

 

‘Nothing,’ Hank explained. ‘I was just standing by the spot you’d disappeared and then suddenly the floor gave way.’

 

Nick realised that he was hearing a horrible echo and delayed murmur of Hank’s voice and hastily disconnected the phone call, carefully keeping the bright glare of the flashlight away from Hank and instead aiming it up at the ceiling. A moment later the beam of Hank’s own flashlight (an actual flashlight he must have had in his pocket) joined Nick’s. Carefully staring at the ceiling however well it was illuminated did not make sense of anything.

 

‘Does that look like a perfectly ordinary ceiling to you?’ Nick ventured.

 

‘Yes,’ Hank replied and Nick frowned at the return of the coldness in Hank’s tone.

 

‘Guess we’re picking the lock.’

 

‘Guess so.’

 

Five minutes later, after they’d both had a go at cracking the lock with the set of lock picks Nick had taken to carrying around (wesen crimes often required less than legal modes of entry and he couldn’t always rely on Adalind’s ability to move the tumblers in a lock with just a flick of her hand), the door remained firmly closed.

 

Nick didn’t have any aversions to small spaces and Hank had never shown an inclination toward claustrophobia but something about this small room (possibly the company) was making Hank twitching and that in turn was awakening Nick’s anger. He got a certain amount of pleasure out of his next phone call.

 

‘What would you say if I told you I’m stuck in an underground chamber with no way out?’ he asked Adalind, not bothering with a greeting at all.

 

Bemused she asked, ‘Is this a hypothetical situation or should I go get Monroe and Wu to rescue you?’

 

‘Yeah, you’re going to need Monroe and Wu,’ he admitted. ‘Hank and I fell through the floor of the secret room.’

 

‘You fell through the floor.’

 

‘Yes?’

 

He heard her sigh and he could picture her debating whether or not to ask if he was alright but heard it in her breathing the moment she decided if he was up and moving around and calling her then he would be okay until she could actually get a look at him.

 

‘How do you just fall through the floor?’

 

‘It opened up and swallowed us.’

 

‘It – what?’

 

‘Is that a thing?’ Nick wondered. ‘Is that some sort of hexenbiest trick because I’m not kidding, we pretty much just sank through the floor.’

 

‘You sank through the floor,’ Adalind repeated and though he couldn’t blame her for sounding so sceptical her repetition of everything he was saying was not getting them out of the underground chamber. ‘Can you see where you fell through?’

 

‘No,’ Nick looked back up at the ceiling. ‘It’s just a perfectly ordinary – dark – room with no hole or trapdoor in the ceiling.’

 

‘And you have no idea how you triggered the floor opening up and swallowing you?’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Is there anything else in the room?’ she asked and then in the background he could hear Rosalee calling Wu and explaining the situation to both him and Monroe. Nick could hear amusement in Monroe’s tone even over the distance and the phone.

 

‘There’s a door that looks like its straight out of _Alice in Wonderland_ but its locked and we couldn’t get it open.’

 

There was a thoughtful pause on Adalind’s end and Nick found himself watching Hank who seemed to be considering the small door. Just as Adalind started to ask him another question, Hank took a meaningful step forward and slammed his booted foot against the door.

 

The door didn’t budge. Hank ended up sprawled on his back at Nick’s feet, face screwed up in agony. In the gloom of the room it was hard to tell but Nick thought his partner was sweating. It wasn’t warm at all in the small room, maybe Hank really was sick.

 

‘What was that?’ Adalind demanded.

 

‘Hank trying to kick open the door.’

 

‘Oh.’ Another lengthy pause and then, ‘Is there blood in the lock?’

 

Her question surprised Nick, though really, he wasn’t sure why. If there was one thing he’d come to learn since becoming friends with Adalind it was that there was a lot of things about the wesen world he didn’t know. There were a lot of things Adalind knew that Nick doubted he’d ever know, it caused an absurd swell of pride every time she said something that reminded him just how smart and brilliant she was. He had to resist the urge to tell her he loved her.

 

‘You’re giving me that look again, aren’t you?’ Adalind asked.

 

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he bluffed, straightening out his expression and getting a disgusted look from Hank who, despite not being able to hear Adalind’s side of the conversation, seemed to feel the whole thing was sickeningly sweet.

 

‘Sure you don’t. Seriously though, is there blood in the lock?’

 

‘Yeah, it’s dried, pretty old, but it’s not rust.’

 

‘You’re not getting out of that room without a hexenbiest,’ she informed him. ‘We’re on our way.’

 

‘Thanks.’ He went to end the call when he thought of something. ‘Don’t fall through the floor!’

 

It was amazing how loud an eye roll could be.

 

‘Adalind says we’re not getting out of here without a hexenbiest,’ he informed Hank, who was only just getting to his feet. Judging by all the wincing, he’d done even more damage to his ankle trying to kick open the little door.

 

‘She would say that.’

 

Nick ignored him. ‘She’s bringing Monroe and Wu.’

 

‘Good.’

 

Silence. Incredibly awkward, highly tense silence filled the room. Nick tried to break the quiet a few times, but Hank’s only response to his questions or his speculations were grunts that Nick had no way of knowing if they meant Hank agreed, disagreed or was frankly even listening.

 

By the time Wu arrived calling their names, Nick had reached breaking point. One more moment of silence and he’d have snapped and punched Hank. Seriously, how did somebody breathe so loudly? How could somebody just stand there in complete silence oozing resentment and general grumpiness?

 

‘Where exactly am I not to stand?’ Wu called down to them. ‘Adalind didn’t seem to know.’

 

Nick tried to give as exact a point as he could (Hank was no help) so they didn’t end up with Wu falling through the floor too but he wasn’t sure how successful he was because Wu declared he’d just stand in the doorway until Adalind arrived with Monroe. Which didn’t actually take that long, not even a minute later he could hear Monroe voicing his interest in the strange room and trying to work out with Wu where it was they shouldn’t stand.

 

Over it all he could hear Adalind cautioning them not to get it wrong. He really hoped she didn’t fall through the floor, he didn’t want to be the reason his pregnant girlfriend injured herself and potentially harmed their son. ‘Please don’t fall through the floor!’ he called up to her.

 

‘You’ll just have to catch me!’ she shouted back, thankfully he knew she was kidding. ‘How did you find the place where you fell?’

 

‘There was a weird smell,’ he answered, unable to give her anything more to go on.

 

His enhanced hearing picked up cautious movement that he took as Monroe shuffling awkwardly across the floor, trying to pick up on the smell Nick had identified. There was some stomping (testing the floor?), some more shuffling, a yelp and then three sharp raps on the ceiling (floor?) and suddenly there was light in the small chamber and Adalind, Monroe and Wu were peering down at him and Hank.

 

‘Neat trick,’ Wu remarked.

 

‘Can you just get us out of here?’ Hank snapped.

 

Wu didn’t react to the sharpness of Hank’s words, just lowered down a rope so that he and Hank could pull themselves out of the chamber. When they were both standing back in the library, Adalind looked them over, scrunching up her nose.

 

‘Ugh, what is that smell?’

 

Nick took a cursory sniff but couldn’t smell what she was. ‘Sensitive nose?’ he suggested.

 

‘Probably,’ she grouched.

 

‘Will that stay open now that you’ve done whatever it is you did?’ Wu wondered.

 

Adalind shrugged. ‘I can keep it open or I can close it. It’s an easy enough trick now I know what it is.’

 

‘Better close it,’ Nick advised. ‘I don’t want someone else coming in here and finding the secret chamber under the secret room.’

 

‘Kind of overkill, isn’t it?’ Monroe mused. ‘Hiding a secret chamber under a secret room.’

 

Nick nodded, all the secrets suggested whatever was on the other side of that door was definitely worth hiding. He had hopes that the dried blood on the lock and the mustiness of the air was indicative that whoever had killed their victim hadn’t found the room. Of course, Nick wasn’t sure how _he’d_ found the room so he probably shouldn’t have been surprised the killer hadn’t.

 

‘We’ll come back tomorrow, when we’ve got more time, see if Adalind can get us through that door.’

 

Adalind peered down into the darkness. ‘We’re going to need a ladder.’

 

‘I figured.’

 

Adalind clicked her fingers and rapped her foot sharply against the floor and the hole closed over. ‘I think you must have tapped it without realising it,’ she explained. ‘Hank was probably tapping his foot impatiently when he fell through.’

 

Nick shrugged. ‘if you say so. Come on, let’s get back to the Spice Shop.’

 

Hank didn’t wait for them and when they got outside it was to see the rear of his car smoothly pulling off down the drive.

 

‘Guess I’m riding with you,’ he told Adalind.

 

Hank was waiting for them at the Spice Shop, leaning moodily against the wall in the side room and drawing worried looks from Rosalee. In the bright light of the shop it was easier to see the unhealthy pallor of Hank’s skin, the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the odd way he kept shifting from foot to foot.

 

‘Ugh, seriously,’ Adalind complained, following Nick in, ‘what is that smell?’

 

This time Monroe sniffed the air. ‘It’s definitely just you,’ he told her.

 

‘Because I needed another fun pregnancy symptom.’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick grinned. ‘I kind of like how horny its making you.’

 

She shot him a dirty look, unamused. Hank shot them both a disgusted look and the air in the shop turned from friendly teasing to tense in the span of a look.

 

‘Seriously, man,’ Hank snarled. ‘Adalind?’

 

‘What is your problem?’ Nick demanded and then, ‘Hank, you really don’t look good.’

 

Hank dismissed the suggestion he might be sick and took an aggressive step toward Nick. Nick reacted by taking his own step forward, trying to put himself firmly between Adalind and Hank and opened his mouth to make another comment only Adalind suddenly grabbed the side of his head and dragged him closer so she could lick the side of his face.

 

For a moment, no one in the room moved. They were a group of people used to dealing with strange things but that didn’t mean they were quite prepared for Adalind to unexpectedly lick Nick. Hell, he wasn’t prepared for it. He turned his head to look at her; her eyes were slightly unfocused and she was smacking her lips lightly as though testing the taste of something.

 

‘Uh,’ Wu managed to say eventually. ‘What was that?’

 

Instead of explaining herself, Adalind turned sharply and snatched a jar of some sort of green root of the shelf behind her. She opened the lid, broke a bit off and handed it to Nick. ‘Chew,’ she ordered.

 

Nick reached out a hand automatically, took the root and stuck it in his mouth. It tasted horrible and made his eyes water. She whipped another jar off the shelf, oblivious to the questions being thrown at her and plopped a yellow flower into her own mouth. She chewed vigorously for a few moments before she spat it into the palm of her hand and held it out to Nick.

 

‘This too.’

 

Taking the slimy masticated flower, Nick obediently put it in his mouth. He chewed the two together for a moment and then she held out her hand again. Nick obediently spat the wad of flower and root into her palm. The taste it left on his tongue wasn’t nearly as bad as before but the sensation it created in his nose was considerably more unpleasant.

 

But she wasn’t ready to explain yet, she turned on Hank, who opened his mouth to protest and she must have used her powers to help because he froze and she had enough time to shove the chewed-up mess into his mouth before he broke free of her hold.

 

‘Chew,’ she told him firmly, pressing her hand to Hank’s jaw to prevent him from spitting it out. He didn’t put up much of a fight which was surprising. It probably helped that even if they weren’t currently on friendly terms, Nick’s chewing the horrible thing first made it easier to do as she said. ‘Swallow it.’

 

‘What the hell was that about?’ Nick asked once Hank had swallowed the mess.

 

‘Hank’s been poisoned.’


	25. Chapter 23

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 23**

‘Hank’s been poisoned.’

 

‘I what?’ Hank asked in alarm, through watery eyes and a runny nose. Whatever it was Adalind had forced them to chew was having a much greater effect on Hank.

 

‘Poison,’ Adalind repeated. ‘It’s what I’ve been smelling since we pulled you out of that hole in the ground.’

 

‘Someone poisoned me?’

 

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying, someone poisoned you and it’s been affecting Nick as well.’

 

‘Affecting me how?’ Nick asked, rubbing at his cheek where Adalind had licked him. He wasn’t opposed to being covered in her bodily fluids but there was usually more fun involved and certainly less clothes and absolutely none of their friends.

 

Rosalee who was examining which root and flower Adalind had chosen seemed to understand what she was getting at. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘If this is what I think it is, it’s rare – and dangerous.’

 

‘What?’ Hank’s level of alarm had reached high pitched levels but Nick noticed he didn’t seem angry anymore.

 

‘This poison was making him angry and moody?’ Nick looked his partner over, assessing the way his pupils were dilated and how his eyes were starting to leak a grey tinged fluid but the sweating seemed to have stopped. He reached for the box of tissues on the work bench and held it out to Hank. ‘You’re leaking grey fluid.’

 

With a grimace, Hank took a handful of tissues and started to wipe at his nose and eyes. ‘I wasn’t angry and moody,’ he protested but he didn’t sound like he believed his own words, much less that he expected them to believe them.

 

‘It’s a pheromone of sorts,’ Adalind explained. ‘If I’m right, someone has been dosing you with it, probably for months, steadily building it up in your system until it started affecting Nick.’

 

‘That’s why I got so angry with him?’ Nick glanced between Adalind and Rosalee for confirmation. ‘I was feeding off his crazy?’

 

‘Well,’ Rosalee began cautiously, ‘not exactly.’

 

‘What does that mean?’ Monroe demanded.

 

‘It builds off things you’re already feeling,’ Adalind explained. ‘Hank was hiding something from you and so it built and built until he was actively avoiding knowing anything or telling you anything. It builds like paranoia in a way, starts off with little things like telling himself he can handle HW and doesn’t need to bother you and then builds to completely lying about it, believing the threats they make and twisting around the anger he’s already feeling until its dark and ugly.

 

‘You were supposed to get swept up in it,’ Adalind concluded. ‘There’s no other reason to use this particular poison, plenty of others could have incited that kind of paranoia and inconsistent behaviour – this one specifically targets Grimms.’

 

‘But I’m okay now?’ The high pitch was still there is Hank’s voice but he had calmed down slightly with Adalind’s explanation – which really just went to show how out of character he’d been acting before if Adalind’s words and explanation were having a calming effect.

 

‘No, you’re still sick.’ Adalind didn’t bother to be gentle about it. ‘Nick’s fine, chewing that root and flower will stop it affecting him but it’s only a temporary fix for you. In four hours and thirteen minutes you’ll be angry, paranoid and potentially violent all over again.’

 

‘What?!’

 

Adalind shrugged. ‘We just keep feeding you the root and flower until we can find you a cure.’

 

‘But won’t that cause some other problems?’ Rosalee pointed out. ‘The root alone causes all sorts of harmful side effects if you eat too much of it – it’s why I only ever tell my customers to make a tea infusion with it.’

 

‘What kind of side-effects?’ Wu seemed more interested than alarmed by this but Nick was watching Hank closely, noticing that his partner was starting to sway slightly on his feet and that his breathing was coming in short sharp gasps.

 

‘I don’t – don’t -’ Hank trailed off, his eyes rolled back into his head and he simply folded at the knees. Monroe reached him in time to catch him by the arm and prevent his head from cracking against the work bench but it was a close thing.

 

Nick thought this conversation would probably go a lot smoother without Hank being alarmed every time they said something that wasn’t positive. It was weird how different his attitude toward Hank was now, there was less anger and more concern. He could see Hank struggling and was worried about him but he also knew the anger wasn’t going to fade completely. He was still annoyed at Hank for keeping his secrets, he just understood now that something else had been driving him to change his behaviour.

 

He could also acknowledge now that _he’d_ been keeping just as many secrets from Hank, he just didn’t think avoiding talking about Adalind was a potentially lethal secret.

 

He and Monroe managed to manoeuvre Hank onto the small cot and Rosalee stuck a thermometer in his mouth. He might not have been sweating anymore but his eyes and now nose were still leaking the greyish fluid and he’d started to shake.

 

‘Is this something HW could have done?’ Nick asked of Adalind.

 

She nodded. ‘I don’t know that anyone else would have bothered, I just don’t know why they went about it this way. Getting you mad at Hank wouldn’t do much more than separate you from him at best, at worst you’d kill him but I’m not sure how they hoped that would work for them.’

 

‘I could have killed him?’

 

Adalind shrugged but Rosalee gave him an answer. ‘He’d have snapped, Hank might have gotten so mad he’d attack you and once he did that he wouldn’t have stopped until you stopped him.’

 

‘Well, assuming that was HW’s plan,’ Wu muttered, ‘why would they care so much about Nick killing Hank?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Rosalee replied.

 

‘None of their plans seem to make sense to me,’ Adalind admitted. ‘Hank didn’t know any secrets to give away, maybe this was how they were going to break you?’

 

‘But if he was just as mad at Hank, then it wouldn’t break him,’ Rosalee reasoned.

 

‘It would when the poison was no longer around to affect him,’ Monroe pointed out.

 

Nick nodded. ‘When I was mad at him I was still focused on the fact that he was acting weird, now that it’s not working on me I’m not exactly happy with the way I acted. If I’d killed Hank in a fit of rage, when the poison did wear off I’d be more than just angry.’

 

‘You’d kill everyone responsible,’ Adalind acknowledged, not seeming particularly concerned by this. He supposed for Adalind this was neither a revelation nor something she really cared about. Death and destruction were facts of the world she grew up in, if Nick suddenly went on a rampage and killed a bunch of people it wasn’t likely to change how she felt about him. His own mother had killed her mother and she didn’t hold that against him (or his mother).

 

‘Only if you realised Hank had been poisoned, though,’ realised Monroe. ‘If Adalind hadn’t figured it out, we wouldn’t have known, it would have just been you getting angry and killing Hank.’

 

‘You think that was their plan?’ Wu didn’t sound impressed and Nick was right there with him. As far as plans went, that was a monumentally stupid one because it relied on then not figuring out that Hank, who they’d all known for years, was acting out of character and that Nick killing his long-time friend was somehow in-character.

 

It also didn’t factor in Rosalee owning the Spice Shop and knowing a lot about her wares. It definitely didn’t factor in his girlfriend being a smart, powerful hexenbiest who had literally sniffed out the problem. The plan was crude, flawed and a whole host of other things that didn’t fit with this big scary government agency they’d been hearing about.

 

But it didn’t fit with what they knew about Black Claw either.

 

Nick scrubbed a tired hand over his face, flinching slightly at the faint twinge in his wrist. He’d almost completely forgotten about his injuries from the fall into the hole and Hank hadn’t seemed at all bothered by his ankle once they were out of the underground room. Something Nick realised likely had more to do with his being poisoned and around Nick in such close quarters, than it actually healing. He’d been standing on that ankle for at least half an hour possibly more and he hadn’t even winced.

 

‘You should take a look at his ankle,’ Nick requested of Rosalee. ‘He landed on it funny when we fell through the floor.’

 

Rosalee did as he asked, tasking Monroe to help her remove Hank’s boot. The shoe had been keeping the swelling down but once it had been removed it was easy to see Hank’s ankle was bruised and puffy. Rosalee probed it gingerly with calm, precise movements.

 

‘I don’t think it’s broken, just sprained. I’ll get some ice, elevate it and hopefully the swelling will have gone down before he wakes up again and tries to stand on it.’

 

‘We need to know who he’s had contact with from HW.’ It was more important than ever that they get to the bottom of this mess with HW and Black Claw. ‘Is this poison something that comes from a wesen or is it made?’

 

‘Made,’ Adalind told him.

 

‘Which might make it harder to trace.’ He looked over at Hank again as Rosalee finished binding an ice pack to his ankle. ‘I’m going to need you to come up with a list of ingredients and places that might stock them so we can start looking for the source. Any luck tracing the phone?’ he asked Wu over the sound of the door opening and the bell tinkling. It was easy to forget sometimes that the Spice Shop wasn’t just there for them to use when trouble rolled around.

 

Wu shook his head. ‘I got as far as tracing it to a list of government issued encrypted phones and then I had to back off.’

 

‘What about Trubel?’

 

‘What about me?’

 

Nick looked up at the unexpected addition to their conversation and felt relief sweep over him. He hadn’t realised just how truly worried about the younger Grimm he was until he could see her standing in front of him. She looked a little worse for wear, there was a bruise on her cheek that was quickly fading and a cut on her lip that looked no more than a couple of hours old but she was standing under her own power and her eyes were bright and alert. He didn’t know what the hell she was wearing, it looked like some sort of body armour but he figured being recruited by a shady government agency had to come with some fancy perks.

 

Even if you were trying to run away from them.

 

Trubel moved further into the room and Nick stepped forward to meet her for a hug. She winced a little at the movement and he gathered she had some bruised ribs to go with the bruised face. ‘You okay?’

 

Trubel nodded, giving him a smile as she moved on to greet Adalind. ‘Can I?’ Adalind nodded and Trubel reached out a hesitant hand to touch Adalind’s belly. ‘Holy crap,’ Trubel muttered in surprise. ‘That’s some kick.’

 

‘He’s strong,’ Adalind told her proudly. ‘He always seems to know when someone’s copping a feel because he starts kicking like mad.’

 

Trubel snorted a laugh before she let her attention wander to Hank. ‘What’s up with Hank?’

 

That sobered the mood in the room and Rosalee gave a quick explanation for what they knew and what they didn’t. It went without saying that what they didn’t know took a lot longer to explain than what they did.

 

‘Josh made it out okay?’ Trubel checked, when they were done adding what they could to Rosalee’s explanation.

 

‘Yes, Monroe and I brought him home last night. He’s going to need some physical therapy but I think he should be okay – he’s a Grimm now.’

 

Apparently, Josh’s altered status was news to Trubel. ‘It worked?’ She didn’t sound thrilled about it. ‘The torture worked?’

 

Nick nodded, expression hard. ‘It did. He got banged up badly just trying to escape. What the hell have you gotten yourself into?’

 

Trubel shook her head in denial. ‘It seemed like a good idea at first but the more I know – the more work I do for them – the more I know it’s bad.’

 

‘We don’t really know anything more than Josh or Hank could tell us,’ Adalind explained. ‘That wasn’t much. No one here in Portland seems to have come across Hadrian’s Wall or Black Claw – at least not that they’re willing to say.’

 

Trubel nodded like she expected to hear as much. ‘Most of what I’ve been doing has been on the east coast and in Europe.’

 

‘Is it really as bad as they made it seem to Hank?’ Rosalee asked.

 

Trubel nodded. ‘There it is, yeah, Black Claw are killing a lot of good people and recruiting everyone they can to their cause. It’s taking everything HW has to keep them from taking control and doing too much damage.’

 

‘Renard knows nothing about this.’ Nick felt pointing this out might clarify a few more things. If Renard didn’t know then it was unlikely the Royals knew and that meant things were either much worse than they realised, much better, or the Royals were falling apart. He’d liked to think it was that things weren’t nearly so bad but realistically it was more likely it was either very bad or the Royals were being systematically taken out of the equation.

 

‘HW has managed to keep a lid on things,’ Trubel explained. ‘I don’t even think the Wesen Council know about this yet.’

 

‘But that makes no sense,’ Rosalee interjected. ‘How can something involving so many wesen be so easily avoiding detection by the Royals and the Wesen Council?’

 

‘Moles,’ Nick, Adalind and Wu all said at the same time, answering her question before Trubel could.

 

‘They’ve got someone on the inside of both,’ Nick spoke with certainty. ‘We now Meisner has worked for the Royals before while he supported the Resistance, there’s no reason he couldn’t have another way to keep the Royals in the dark.’

 

‘Someone’s filtering news for the Council as well,’ Trubel explained. ‘There must be more than one but I don’t know names or even faces.’

 

‘Do you know much about HW here in Portland?’ Nick questioned. ‘We need to know who has been dosing Hank and why.’

 

‘I’ve been hearing rumours lately that HW has plans to move their operation to Portland but I don’t know why and I haven’t been able to find anything that says the rumours are true.’

 

‘Why would they move to Portland when there’s nothing here for them to fight?’ Monroe wondered. ‘Isn’t that just asking them to bring the fight to them?’

 

‘That’s the point,’ Nick realised. ‘To bring the fight here, I mean.’

 

Adalind nodded thoughtfully, following his line of thought as well as she always did. ‘They’re bringing the fight to you, that’s what this whole thing with Hank has been about. It’s why they’ve been sending assassins after us, why we’ve been fighting off HW, Black Claw and the Royals, they want you in this fight and they’re making it seem like you’re already a part of it.’

 

‘Why do they want you so badly?’ Wu asked. ‘I mean, I get that you’re a Grimm and we know from Josh that they’re recruiting Grimms, but why you? Why do they want you so badly?’

 

‘Because you’re not like other Grimms,’ Adalind said with certainty. ‘I’ve never heard of a Grimm with wesen friends, never heard of a Grimm who doesn’t just kill the wesen problem that gets in their way.’

 

‘Never heard of a Grimm who fell in love with a hexenbiest,’ Monroe added, seeing where she was going. ‘We know from Josh that some of the people HW employ are wesen and we know that they don’t let a lot of the Grimms interact with them.’

 

Trubel nodded. ‘Josh and I worked with wesen all the time but I talked with a Grimm in Haiti and he didn’t even know HW employed wesen.’

 

‘Really?’ For some reason this really surprised Nick. Not that a Grimm in Haiti didn’t know he was working with wesen but that HW was going out of their way to make sure the Grimms they were recruiting didn’t even know about the wesen in their ranks.

 

‘Who do they think HW are then?’ Rosalee wanted to know.

 

Trubel shrugged. ‘Specially trained government employees?’ she guessed.

 

‘The Royals don’t like to mix their blood with wesen,’ Adalind reasoned. ‘They still manage to spot them okay.’

 

Which posed an interesting question for Nick. ‘Can the Royals tell when someone is wesen like Grimms can?’

 

‘I’ve never asked,’ Adalind said with surprise. ‘You’d have to ask Sean.’

 

‘Maybe they can,’ Monroe reasoned. ‘It would make sense, just another secret they’ve been keeping from the rest of the world.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘You can’t control a people if you have no way of identifying them when you see them.’

 

‘This is just creating more questions,’ Wu pointed out.

 

‘He’s right,’ Nick frowned. ‘We don’t need more questions right now, we need answers.’

 

‘Prioritise?’ Adalind suggested. ‘Rosalee and I can work on finding a cure for Hank, Trubel and Monroe can look for the one who poisoned him – assuming you still have contact with HW – and Nick and Wu can stick with your original investigation.’

 

Honestly, Nick had almost forgotten about the dead hexenbiest and the mysteries of that big old house. It was nice to know Adalind was keeping track of things and not losing perspective. It was hard to leave Hank behind, knowing that the poison was making him sicker and sicker (and that the temporary cure was too) but Adalind was right when she reminded them they all had jobs to do. He trusted that she and Rosalee wouldn’t let anything happen to Hank. He knew Trubel and Monroe could look out for each other while he and Wu really had the easiest job of all because neither of them had any new clues to go on in their case and a lot more dead-ends to cross off their list.

 

As they couldn't do anything more at the house without Adalind, Nick and Wu went back to the station she to follow up what they could from there. Nick was beginning to think Wu had the right idea going so far back to find when the Dobrini’s had owned the house. If they kept thinking in that vein, then it made sense to look back to when the house was originally built or even before that to get some answers as to why there was an underground room secreted beneath an already secret room.

 

Of course, the mystery of the underground chamber, while intriguing and definitely wesen related, didn't help them narrow down who killed her, at least not quickly. The best they could hope for was that by looking for who had created the underground chamber they might somehow find out who else knew about it. As far as the local council were concerned there was nothing beneath the house and never had been. And as they kept insisting there wasn’t a secret library/lab even though they'd been presented with the evidence Nick wasn't keen on taking their word for it.

 

While Nick stepped in to update Renard on the situation – made extremely difficult when he came to explain how he'd known to get out of the hole in the floor – Wu started compiling a list of all the families who had owned the property going as far back as to when the house had been built in 1788.

 

Renard might have gotten stuck on the idea that he and Hank had fallen through the floor if not for the news that Hank had been poisoned in an apparent attempt to get to Nick.

 

‘This HW is becoming a problem,’ Renard conceded, like Nick hadn't already been telling him as much.

 

'I know,' Nick agreed. ‘At least now that Trubel is back we have a better chance of getting some answers.’

 

‘You trust her?’

 

‘Yes.’ Nick wasn’t offended by the question, given the number of people suddenly out to get them and the lengths HW appeared to be going to in order to get at them, it was a perfectly reasonable caution to suspect everyone. But not Trubel. It was weird how suddenly having three different groups out to get you could make a little thing like hiding Trubel’s nature from Renard seem insignificant.

 

It wasn’t like Renard hadn’t suspected. Watching the way Trubel beheaded Steward and had kept her cool while he lay in the hallway bleeding from a couple of non-fatal bullet wounds had likely clued Renard in to Trubel’s nature, even if he hadn’t gotten a nice long look at her eyes during some brief attempts to keep him from bleeding out.

 

Renard nodded as if he’d expected Nick’s response. ‘I made some calls,’ Renard informed him. ‘I have some people I know looking for any hint of Black Claw or HW in Europe or here.’

 

‘No one had heard of them before you asked?’

 

‘No,’ Renard confirmed. Nick was glad to see that this worried Renard as much as it worried the rest of them. How was it possible this apparently violent and dangerous group had been amassing power and none of them had noticed? Weren’t the Royals supposed to keep a lid on this kind of thing? Wasn’t the Council?

 

‘Hey, can those of Royal blood see wesen like Grimms?’

 

The question took Renard by surprise but to his credit he didn’t immediately dismiss it or gloss over it. It might have been a weird question to suddenly ask but now that it had come up in conversation he wanted an answer. Just how did the Royals manage to maintain so much power when they prided themselves on their pure blood? Nick was pretty sure the fight over Diana had been mostly about the power the baby could provide, first it had been power of an heir – though illegitimate – and now that they knew how powerful she was, they were after her for her hexenbiest powers and not just because she could finally provide sway over Renard. Not to mention she was an excellent way to control Adalind, who was definitely a power worth having in her own right.

 

‘It’s not something usually discussed,’ Renard told Nick. ‘As far as I know it doesn’t work like a Grimms power, more like just the knowledge that the person they’re looking at or dealing with is wesen. There’s no kneejerk reaction to woge, no terrifying black eyes.’

 

‘Huh, good to know.’

 

‘Is this poison going to wear off?’ Renard questioned. ‘Is Hank going to be back to normal once its cured or will there be residual effects?’

 

‘He seemed pretty much like his old self after we gave him the root and flower, I’m hoping that means he’ll go right back to being the old Hank.’

 

‘And if he doesn’t?’

 

Nick shrugged. ‘We’ll do what we have to.’

 

Renard seemed satisfied with that and Nick was comfortable not explicitly explaining his idea for dealing with Hank. The knowledge that he was going to have to sit down and talk through their problems if they were truly going to overcome the effects of the poison was already making Nick twitchy. He’d gone through stages of wanting to tell Hank everything and others where he didn’t want Hank to know anything at all. Some of that was probably an effect of the poison but not all of it.

 

Some of it was not wanting to hear Hank’s disappointment, not only because Hank had been hurt badly by Adalind (that whole leaving him for dead thing) but because Hank was Juliette’s friend and now that he and Adalind were together and expecting a kid there’d be that added layer of disappointment and probably betrayal for having slept with Adalind while he was with Juliette.

 

Strangely enough, when the time came to finally tell Hank the truth, Nick wasn’t sure he wanted to tell his partner about Adalind looking like Juliette and the power stripping ritual. It didn’t reflect well on Adalind (or him) and if some of the things Hank had been snapping at him were any indication, his partner wasn’t as likely to throw it off as normal wesen/Grimm weirdness as Monroe or even Wu had. In the end, it all came down to the fact that he was with Adalind now and their relationship had started that morning whether or not they’d realised what was coming. Hank needed to know that Nick was the father but Nick wasn’t sure he needed to know the true details of their son’s conception.

 

The less people who knew, the less likely it was for their son to hear it one day. Or for Renard to find out. Nick could absolutely do without Renard ever finding out about that morning.

 

‘Found anything?’ Nick stopped by Wu’s desk to ask.

 

The sergeant looked up and the answer was written clearly on his face. ‘I was hoping for a mysterious Native American burial site or some sort of massacre to be honest.’

 

‘A massacre?’ Nick snorted. ‘The Native American burial ground I get but a massacre?’

 

Wu shrugged, unabashed. ‘So far, the history of this house is boring and uneventful.’

 

‘You found the identity of our victim looking through all this,’ Nick pointed out, ‘there’s got to be something here.’

 

‘I have no idea how I managed that,’ Wu assured him. ‘It seems to have been a fluke.’

 

Feeling like that might have been the case, Nick refrained from speculating on the likelihood of another fluke occurring and instead asked, ‘You got names for me to run?’

 

Wu tore a post-it note off a stack and handed it to Nick. ‘The families that owned the house before Dobrini.’ He handed Nick another post-it. ‘Dobrini’s son is in town to claim the body, that’s his number and address while he’s in town.’

 

Nick took both notes, knowing his priority needed to be to call Dobrini’s son to question him about his mother’s disappearance and possible the family’s continued connection to the house. Wu could look into the mystery of the chamber and lab for now. They were making a lot of assumptions about the importance of the secret library/lab and the underground chamber but Nick’s gut said all of it was connected to her death.

 

It seemed like too much of a coincidence that Dobrini’s body was found in a secret room above another secret room in a house that no longer belonged to her. At least they could explain away the lack of signs of a break in, because the developer hadn’t had to change the locks just yet and none of them had the scratches and marks that suggested they’d be broken open.

 

Which further suggested that Dobrini had known her killer.

 

The phone call with the son gave him nothing, no new names, nothing that he’d suddenly remembered was odd about his mother’s behaviour and as far as Nick could tell, he’d been truthful when he’d said he had no idea there was a secret room in the house and no idea why his mother would be there.

 

‘We have plenty of other houses and estates,’ he’d told Nick in a bored and lofty tone. He hadn’t sounded particularly cut up about his mother’s murder and if Nick hadn’t come away from the interview feeling like committing or even planning the murder of his mother would have been too much like hard work and not worth the bother, he might have considered the son a suspect.

 

As it was, both he and Wu returned to the Spice Shop with little to show for their hours of work. Monroe and Trubel had, thankfully, had more luck, though what they’d uncovered seemed to have unsettled Monroe.

 

‘I didn’t see much of it,’ the blutbad admitted. ‘Trubel went in alone, but Nick, their new place is literally a bunker.’

 

‘They’re planning to stay,’ Trubel confirmed. ‘They’ve had a small team working under Chavez for a year or so, based out of the bunker.’

 

‘They let you in?’ Nick gathered, judging by the way Trubel was talking about the place, her credentials, or whatever passed for credentials with a secret organisation, were still valid.

 

The younger Grimm nodded. ‘I don’t like what they’re doing – some of it anyway – but they don’t know that, they think I’m the good little Grimm home visiting friends.’

 

‘Good,’ Nick said. ‘It needs to stay that way.’

 

‘They’re going to know you’ve had contact with Josh,’ Adalind murmured quietly, intent on measuring out just the right amount of oil into the cauldron she and Rosalee had brewing.

 

‘I know,’ Trubel acknowledged. ‘I’m worried they won’t care.’

 

‘What do you mean?’ Rosalee asked, handing Adalind a ladle before she could ask.

 

‘If they don’t make a fuss about getting him back it means they want him here staying with you, working with you.’

 

‘More time to study me, huh?’ It was weird to think about a government agency being so invested in his life but Nick couldn’t deny they existed and that they lived to make things difficult for Josh and Trubel. Josh had been through a lot, there was just no way they’d let him go after investing so much in breaking him and bringing out his powers as a Grimm. Were they hoping to observe the way he taught Josh as he’d taught Trubel? Were they waiting for him to lead them somewhere?

 

Really, was it too much to ask that they just get a few simple and straightforward answers?


	26. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos!

 

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 24**

Nick had woken up with a firm plan in mind for the day. They’d had to stop dosing Hank so heavily the day before but Rosalee thought she might finally have found an antidote for the poison, one that thankfully didn’t need something from the person who had poisoned him. The one problem with this antidote (and Nick wasn’t sure it was a problem) was that it involved alcohol as a catalyst and not just a little bit mixed into the potion while she and Adalind were brewing it.

 

‘The reason it’s never worked before,’ Adalind explained to him over breakfast, ‘is that no one has been stupid enough to get raging drunk while under the influence of this thing.’

 

‘How do you know it’ll work then?’

 

Adalind shrugged. ‘Rosalee found an old recipe in one of Dobrini’s books that mentions how important the use of alcohol is for this particular poison. The fact that Hank’s not a big drinker is probably the only reason it worked as well as it did.’

 

‘That’s something they would have known when they dosed him, right?’ Nick pondered the insanity of poisoning Hank the way HW had. There were just so many factors they couldn’t account for, so many things that could have gone wrong. He wondered whether it was a sign of how badly they wanted him or just a sign of how bad they thought things had gotten that Hank’s life was worth risking.

 

Of course, there was a good chance that as an ordinary human, Hank’s life didn’t rank high on HW’s list of things to care about.

 

They clearly hadn’t factored in how highly Nick valued Hank’s life. It was just another in a long line of mistakes they’d made, so helping Hank get monumentally drunk was the last thing on his list of plans for the day. While Wu finished tracking down the origins of the house and the land it sat on, Nick planned to look at Hank’s apparent blackmail from the beginning, just like any other case that crossed his desk. He hoped that by starting from the beginning he would be able to trace who had approached Hank, how they’d been watching him and what other things they might have planned to do to his partner.

 

He was going to take Monroe for that one as he hoped the blutbad would be able to sniff out things Nick couldn’t. He wanted to know what surveillance HW had on Hank and he had hopes that by looking at this like any other case he might see things Hank had missed because he was so deeply involved.

 

As Adalind planned to go to work, they’d have to put off exploring the strange underground room until she was done for the day. Honestly, he expected she’d last until lunch before curiosity got the better of her but that still gave he and Monroe a good couple of hours to go over Hank’s place, to talk to his ex-wives (if they had to) and put together a better idea of just what Hank had been dealing with.

 

Of course, asking Hank for those details would have been ideal but his impressions were coloured through a haze of poison and so any detachment he might have found on the case was now clouded with poison and simulated rage.

 

‘That’s weird,’ Adalind murmured drawing him out of his thoughts. When he focused back on her he realised she was checking her emails on her phone while she finished up her tea.

 

‘What’s weird?’

 

‘It’s an email from you mother.’

 

‘Oh? Did she finally get back to us about HW and Black Claw?’ His mother had a wealth of experience and knowledge he couldn’t even begin to comprehend and to him that meant that she of all people would know something about these two groups.

 

‘No,’ Adalind said with a frown. ‘It’s just a question.’

 

‘So, she doesn’t know anything about them either,’ Nick surmised.

 

‘It’s not that kind of question, look.’ She held out her phone and he read the question that was causing so much consternation.

 

‘What the hell does that mean?’ he wondered, squinting at the words on the small screen, not because they were hard to read but because the question came apropos of nothing.

 

_Would you do anything to keep your daughter safe, even if it meant risking her powers?_

 

‘Do you think something is wrong with Diana?’ Adalind worried. ‘Why would she be asking me this?’

 

‘Hey,’ Nick reached out and gently pulled the phone from her hand before he took her hand in his and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘I’m sure she’s fine and you already know the answer to that question. You’d do anything to keep Diana safe.’

 

Adalind nodded but his words had done little to ease her worry. They’d done little to ease his own. He hadn’t spent much time with Diana in the brief period she’d been in Portland before his mother had fled with her. He might have held her once and at the time he’d been covered in black from head to toe and pretending to be a member of the Resistance so it’d hadn’t exactly been the best time to form any kind of connection with the girl. That didn’t mean he wasn’t worried about her. The more he came to love Adalind the more he cared for Diana simply because she was Adalind’s.

 

Now he worried for Diana not for Adalind’s sake, not for the sake of his mother hiding away with her, but for Diana herself. He hoped Adalind understood that, hoped that every time he talked about their little family that she knew that it would always include Diana whenever it could.

 

While he did the dishes, Adalind sent off a quick reply, no doubt asking a million questions demanding further explanation. He wished, and not for the first time, that he had a better and more secure way to contact his mother. Emails were okay until they weren’t and so even though they did everything they could to keep prying eyes from locating her and Diana by bouncing their emails around the world and using anonymous free accounts set up with fake names, the possibility of them being intercepted and read left them trying to convey thousands of words worth of thoughts and feelings into two or three sentence messages.

 

It was hard enough for Nick knowing how little he really knew about his mother and her whereabouts but for Adalind missing these months with her daughter was agony. She would never get to see her daughter crawl or walk, never get to see her daughter laugh and talk. Unless, they put a stop to the Royals, unless they could find a way to bring an end to these new threats that Black Claw and HW posed, then she might never even get to see her daughter again.

 

The familiar old guilt started chewing up his insides but Nick tamped it down. He’d done what he’d had to do to keep Diana safe and though he wished he’d sent Adalind with her he couldn’t deny that if he had then they wouldn’t be together now, there would be no son growing inside her. He would never have gotten the chance to know the kind of woman Adalind truly was.

 

In that scenario, Adalind might have had her daughter but she’d have been in for a life of constant fear and running. She’d have spent the rest of her life lonely and unable to give Diana the life she truly deserved. Nick would have likely stayed with Juliette long after he should have and been just as unhappy.

 

Selfish as it sounded, sending Diana away had been the best thing for them all. They’d get her back one day and then they could truly be a family again.

 

‘Is that what you really want?’ Monroe asked, after he’d relayed his earlier thoughts to his friend. ‘To be a family with _her_ , I mean?’

 

Nick nodded, using the key he’d taken off Hank to let them in to his house. He’d debated the wisdom of continuing this conversation where prying eyes and ears might overhear them but he and Monroe were good at talking about things without talking about them. They’d be able to carry on this conversation without giving away Diana’s home with his mother even without briefly discussing it beforehand.

 

‘I guess I just see her as family already,’ Nick replied honestly, tugging the key to get it free of the lock. He crouched down and looked at the lock as he added, ‘I’m always going to be part of her life, I’m happy embracing it.’

 

‘You’re going to marry her mother so I guess I see that.’

 

If Monroe was expecting some sort of protest or even a hasty denial at the suggestion he was planning to marry Adalind, Nick was happy to disappoint his friend. Monroe’s brows shot up in surprise when Nick just said, ‘Exactly.’ He ran his fingers over the lock. ‘Scratches on the keyhole, someone broke in.’

 

‘Does Hank have an alarm?’

 

‘No,’ Nick answered. ‘Though I’m sure he’s going to get one now.’

 

Monroe bobbed his head accepting that Hank likely would invest in a home security system once he was free of the poison and potentially planning on getting his own. It was a surprise to Nick that Monroe and Rosalee hadn’t gotten one yet, especially after the wesenrein. He supposed he’d never had one at the old place, the only reason he had one now was because he and Adalind were in the middle of nowhere trying to stay off people’s radar.

 

They didn’t just have cameras and motion detectors, now they had the weird protection spell Henrietta had given them. That had been weird to set up, while Adalind had done the heavy lifting power-wise, Nick had to trail the powder from the jar Henrietta had given them right around the perimeter of the house. Which had first required him to dig up the deed and plans for the factory to sort out how much of it they owned so he knew where he was supposed to pour the powder. He hadn’t much been interested in more than the loft and garage with the handy escape hatch before that and it was surprising to realise how big their property was.

 

If he gave her an hour alone with the plans he imagined Adalind could come up with a lot of ways to use all that space. It would be something to think on later, after all, the loft didn’t exactly have the space for a baby let alone a baby and his big sister.

 

‘This feels weird,’ Monroe admitted, sniffing the air.

 

‘What does?’ Nick asked. ‘Turning Hank’s place over?’

 

Monroe looked around. ‘He’s our friend and he doesn’t exactly know we’re here,’ Monroe agreed. ‘But that’s not what I meant. The air in here is weird.’

 

Nick sniffed the air but whatever Monroe was detecting he couldn’t smell it. ‘I guess you’re smelling what our favourite hexenbiest tasted on my skin.’

 

Monroe snorted at the reminder of Adalind’s unexpected licking. ‘Don’t expect me to lick you.’

 

‘I think I’m good,’ Nick grinned. ‘Think you can find the source?’

 

Shrugging, Monroe started to move around the room to get a better sense of just where the smell was coming from. Nick pulled on a pair of gloves and started to go through Hank’s mail. It was piling up quite badly on the kitchen table, giving Nick the impression that Hank’s behaviour had graduated to ignoring a lot of things beyond Nick’s love life.

 

Not that he’d been expecting differently, but his quick rifle through the mail didn’t turn up anything except a few overdue notices and a subscription to a porn mag Nick would absolutely have to give Hank hell for when he was once again in his right mind. He let Monroe do his sniffing about while he slowly and methodically worked his way through the house, searching for cameras, listening devices and any photos or other evidence Hank might have kept of the blackmail through his exes.

 

Tucked away in what passed for Hank’s home office, Nick found a file with all the evidence Hank had managed to accrue. Given how well Nick knew Hank and how good his partner was at his job, the file was a little on the thin side. Nick wanted to believe that meant Hank had hidden the rest of the evidence elsewhere but realistically it was more likely the poison had been affecting him long enough his investigation into the threats on his exes had gotten sloppy.

 

That had to have been deliberate because Nick had noticed no such slackening of skills when it came to their job. Something HW had done or said to Hank had pushed his focus away from his own blackmail problems but allowed him to focus on work while slowly building up his resentment and anger toward Nick. Which seemed like a hell of a lot of effort to have gone to just to gain Nick’s attention. Almost too much effort, when he thought about it. Surely, having Trubel and Josh had given them everything they needed to get to Nick.

 

But thinking about it was getting him nowhere. He took everything he could find in the office and went back to checking for listening devices while Monroe moved from the kitchen and down the hall to Hank’s bedroom.

 

Nick found a bug in the kitchen, tucked securely into the downlight and almost undetectable – unless you were specifically looking. There was another in a picture in the living room and a couple more dotted throughout the house, including one positioned in the doorway to clock everyone coming and going from the house. The more Nick found the angrier he became and the more determined he was to rid Hank’s house of bugs.

 

By the time Monroe finally sniffed out the source of the weird feeling in the air (it turned out to be carefully applied to each of Hank’s disposable razors – direct contact when he inevitably cut himself on the slight chink in each blade), Nick had found six listening devices and three cameras. He destroyed them all in Hank’s garage with a hammer he took from a small tool box not caring what HW thought of the move. They had to know he was on to them, had to realise that Hank hadn’t been home and failed in riling Nick up sufficiently enough to get himself killed.

 

‘Do you think they’ll come back to install more?’ Monroe wondered, eyeing the broken remains in the evidence bag Nick showed him when they were safely back in the car – which Nick had already checked for surveillance devices.

 

‘I don’t know. I guess it depends why they put them there in the first place.’

 

‘What do you mean?’

 

Nick pulled out onto the street and considered Monroe’s question. Why did he think they wouldn’t be back? Why did he think they’d bothered to put surveillance on Hank’s in the first place? Were they just covering their bases? Were they hoping to find Nick on there? Or were they keeping an eye on their investment so they could judge how well the poison was working for them?

 

‘They have my attention now,’ Nick realised, pegging the thought that had been tugging on him all morning. ‘They don’t need Hank anymore.’

 

At the Spice Shop, Rosalee was putting the final ingredients for the antidote into a cauldron. An image of Adalind standing over a large cauldron with that witches’ hat of hers popped into Nick’s head and he smiled, he found the image oddly endearing. Wu arrived shortly after them and the file he handed Nick was ten times the size of the one Nick handed Wu in return.

 

Monroe took over stirring the potion while Rosalee went to deal with the customer who came in, Trubel on his heels with Josh hobbling along on crutches behind her. The freshly made Grimm was definitely healing faster than he would have before but he wasn’t healing as fast as Nick did these days. Nick didn’t know if his speedy healing was a result of all the things he’d been exposed to over the last few years or if it was a natural progression of his Grimm abilities.

 

He’d add that to the ever-growing list of things he wanted to ask his mother.

 

Josh moved to sit down by Monroe to help with the potion while Trubel moved to read the file over Wu’s shoulder. ‘There’s not much here,’ she observed. ‘It doesn’t look like Hank had time to find anything useful before they poisoned him.’

 

‘You’re sure it was HW, then?’ Josh asked. ‘That they’re the ones who poisoned Hank, I mean.’

 

Monroe answered for them. ‘Looks that way.’

 

‘We found their method for dosing Hank,’ Nick explained. ‘His razors were laced with the stuff and along with all the very expensive spyware, it screams shady government much more than it does rebel wesen group.’

 

This time, Trubel moved away from Wu to get a good look and the broken remains of the surveillance bugs. ‘Yeah, that looks like HW’s tech. I’ve planted a few of them in Black Claw buildings.’

 

‘I think this goes beyond wanting me to ruin my life killing Hank,’ Nick declared. ‘The amount of surveillance they had on Hank suggests he has something they want.’

 

Which was all well and good to speculate but didn’t offer any ideas as to what else they wanted from Hank.

 

Adalind turned up just when they were about to dose Hank with the first cup of antidote; according to Rosalee he’d need four cups every hour before they needed to added the alcohol for another three cups and then Nick was supposed to take him home and get him blind drunk.

 

‘Why do I have to do it?’ he asked, tilting his head to accept the kiss Adalind bestowed on him in greeting.

 

‘You need to sort your shit out,’ she informed him.

 

‘It’s you he seems to have the most issue with,’ Rosalee elaborated. ‘This cure will be more effective if you’re there to work through your issues.’

 

This was met with sniggers of amusement from Monroe, Trubel and Wu and an amused twitch of the lips from Josh. Unfortunately, as much as he wanted to argue against it, he couldn’t fault their logic and he also couldn’t risk Hank’s health on the assumption that none of them wanted to do it so they were making up excuses.

 

Changing the subject entirely, he asked Adalind about her morning. ‘How’d that meeting go with the undergrads?’

 

Adalind scrunched up her nose. ‘One of them is wesen, she’s so timid and when she realised what I am she freaked out. I’m used to being scary,’ Adalind said, ‘but this was weird.’ She shrugged. ‘The other two managed to write her weirdness off – apparently, she’s really shy – and we got the work done. I don’t ever want to have to deal with that again, I still don’t know why they have to be my problem.’

 

Nick smiled at her complaints. ‘You love every minute of it.’

 

‘I kind of do,’ she admitted. ‘I have to be back by three so let’s get this search over with.’

 

They took a ladder this time and with Adalind opening the hole in the floor intentionally there was no awkward falling. She simply did her thing and he and Monroe lowered the ladder down while Wu shined a flashlight down into the darkness, doing little to illuminate the room but his reason for the flashlight had been to check for anyone who might have found their way down into the room. When the light didn’t reflect off anything, he gave the all clear and Nick started down the ladder. Adalind followed quickly behind him, knowing he’d catch her if she started to fall and not minding at all if he copped a feel in the process.

 

She stepped back from the ladder as Nick moved forward to catch the electric lanterns Monroe and Trubel dropped down to him. He handed two off to Adalind and took the other two, working with her to set a perimeter around the room and giving them some more light to work with. Once they had some light, the others started down the ladder leaving Wu up top to keep watch. Adalind turned her attention to the small door and the cursed lock.

 

He’d been afraid, when she’d asked about it, that they’d need the blood of a hexenbiest to open the door but she’d assured him it didn’t need anything so drastic. As he stood back watching her work she got down onto her knees to better study the lock. After a few cautious minutes of probing it, with her fingers and her power, she nodded, leant back and spat on the lock.

 

In the silence of the room they all heard the grinding of rusted gears and then the lock clicked. Adalind reached forward and turned the door handle. The door opened with a dramatic squeak, its hinges as dry and rusty and the locking mechanism. They all winced and Wu stuck his head through the hole to check out the screech.

 

‘Sorry,’ Adalind murmured. If there was anyone on the other side of the door who had somehow failed to hear the lock turning there was no way they’d missed the door opening. Nick thought they were likely safe, unless there was another door on the other side of whatever room this was then he couldn’t imagine anyone inside the room.

 

He’s was partially correct. There wasn’t another door leading off the room, just the one door in and out, but there was someone inside. Well, there had been. Whoever he was he was just a dried-out skeleton now. The room was bigger than the secret room upstairs and the underground chamber combined. They paused for a moment in the doorway letting the lantern light flood into the room.

 

‘Dude,’ Monroe exclaimed from over Nick’s shoulder.

 

Trubel let out an impressed whistle. ‘This was definitely worth hiding.’

 

Nick could only nod his head. The room was absolutely filled with objects, three walls lined with bookshelves were teeming with leather volumes of all shapes and sizes. Four enormous wooden chests with complicated locks were lined up in the middle of the room with open baskets filled with gold, jewels and trinkets sitting atop them – something that suggested what was in those chests were even more valuable.

 

Adalind moved into the room slowly, each step precise and timed to check for traps. After a few steps, she seemed satisfied and he followed her inside, the others trailing behind them. Nick’s eyes darted from the shelves, to the chests, to the open basket which he could now see in the light of the lanterns Trubel and Monroe had brought in, were filled with weapons too. That was why Adalind’s awed whisper of his name took a few moments to penetrate.

 

‘Nick!’ she hissed again, reaching a hand back and swatting at his arm.

 

‘What?’

 

‘Look!’

 

He looked over at her to find she wasn’t staring around like he was, she was looking up. He followed her gaze and his breath caught. Above them, carved into the ceiling was a huge letter “G”.

 

‘I know what this is,’ she murmured her voice filled with something he’d never heard before. ‘Oh my god, I know what this is!’

 

Nick dragged his gaze away from the (extremely) dramatic carving on the ceiling to stare at her. The level of excitement and awe spilling out of her had him picturing her dancing around excitedly but she was standing perfectly still, staring at the carving with wonder he’d only ever before seen directed at pictures of their son.

 

‘What is it?’ he asked when it didn’t look like she was going to explain any time soon.

 

She started moving further into the room as she spoke, tugging her cell phone out of her pocket in order to use the flashlight feature to illuminate the titles of the books on the shelves. ‘Remember I said about some wesen worshipping Grimms? I found this story – barely a mention really – of a group of wesen who protected a great treasure and how they would call on the Grimm in times of need. I thought it was a myth,’ she murmured. ‘It didn’t seem like it could be real.’

 

‘A hidden treasure protected by wesen who worshipped Grimms?’ Trubel sounded confused. ‘Did I miss something?’

 

‘That’s the thing,’ Adalind looked over at Trubel then slid her gaze to Nick. ‘This treasure didn’t belong to the wesen, they guarded it and watched over it, protecting it because the Grimms couldn’t.’

 

‘They’re Grimm books,’ Nick realised, taking a step closer to the shelf to his right and using his own phone to light up the spine of the nearest book. It was blank, no title to tell him what he could expect from the book.

 

‘All this,’ Adalind waved a hand to encompass the entire room, ‘it belongs to you, both of you, and Josh.’

 

Heavy silence hung in the air as the four of them looked around at all the treasure (literal gold and jewels) and the wealth of knowledge contained on the shelves. Eventually, Trubel broke the silence, joking, ‘You’re going to need a bigger trailer.’

 

Nick frowned at her, the implication that he would be taking all of this didn’t sit well with him and she must have noticed the way he was looking at her because she shrugged.

 

‘It makes the most sense for you to keep it,’ she told him. ‘I move around too much. Besides, it’ll give me an excuse to visit more often.’

 

‘I can’t just take this,’ Nick protested. ‘It doesn’t belong to us, this was what Dobrini was hiding.’

 

‘No, Nick,’ Adalind contradicted. ‘This is what Dobrini was protecting.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘Her mark on the wall really was a call to Grimms, that’s why it was perfect, while Fuentes’ was wrong. She knew she was going to die and so she left the mark on the wall for you to find.’

 

‘She’s right,’ Monroe told him quietly. ‘That “G” marks this as yours.’

 

‘It belongs to all Grimms,’ Nick insisted.

 

Trubel shook her head. ‘The only Grimms who should see this are your family.’

 

Adalind nodded, ‘And that means Trubel and Josh and your mother, of course.’

 

Nick was silent for a moment, considering their words. He believed Adalind when she said this was Grimm treasure, he had no reason to doubt her and it did make a weird kind of sense but in the past when he’d taken something for his own there had been no one else around to claim it. This treasure sat on (under?) the land of a property developer and potentially belonged to the woman who had died upstairs.

 

This was a lot to just claim but he knew he would take it, knew without even really thinking about it that he and the others would claim this for their own because if this really was a Grimm treasure then there would be things in there they wouldn’t want any old wesen to see. They didn’t want Black Claw or HW getting their hands on it.

 

‘We’re going to need more boxes,’ he said eventually. ‘We can’t leave it here, not now that we’ve been down here.’

 

Monroe nodded. ‘We’ve left a trail right to this place.’

 

‘Trubel’s right, though,’ Nick pointed out. ‘This isn’t going to fit in the trailer.’

 

‘No,’ Adalind told him. ‘We’ll take it home.’

 

‘You want to out this in your loft?’ Monroe frowned. ‘Will it even fit?’

 

‘No,’ Adalind grinned, ‘I think I’ve just figured out what to do with the factory.’

 

‘Factory?’ Monroe repeated. ‘You have a factory?’

 

‘You guys own that whole building?’ Trubel asked.

 

‘Apparently,’ Adalind confirmed. ‘Nick only just looked at the plans yesterday but we got a spell off a hexenbiest I know, it’s well protected.’

 

‘Protected enough to keep all this safe?’ Monroe checked.

 

Both Nick and Adalind nodded. Trubel elected to go get Wu, they needed his help not only getting the boxes, but packing everything up and moving it, more than they needed someone keeping watch just then. It wasn’t just a matter of loading the books into half a dozen boxes, it took them more than one trip with each of their cars to get it all back to the factory. It didn’t help that they had to leave Monroe on guard while they were trudging back and forth from the room to the car because they couldn’t leave the loaded cars unattended.

 

They left Trubel behind while they made each trip home to the paint factory and if Monroe or Wu found his and Adalind’s choice of home weird, neither mentioned it. Six trips, three cars and Bud’s truck before it was all safely tucked away in a corner of the factory waiting for them to go through it. By the time Hank’s antidote had reached the blind drunk stage, Nick was exhausted and didn’t want to look at another book for at least twelve hours.

 

When he cracked the cap off a bottle and handed it to Hank in his kitchen that night, Nick took one for himself. Hank accepted the bottle warily, eyes already a little unfocused from the spirit-loaded antidote Rosalee had been feeding him.

 

‘Tell me how it started with Adalind,’ Hank requested and the fact that it was a request made in a drowsy voice without any malice was why Nick started at the beginning.

 

Well, not exactly the beginning, he started with the phone call for help.


	27. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter ahead with some more answers and probably more questions but definitely more Nick/Adalind. Also, I have NOT seen the new episode so while I’m not entirely spoiler free I can’t have in depth discussions with you about it.

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 25**

While Nick might have been the one to come home alcohol-soaked and not entirely coherent, Adalind was the one to wake up sick. Any last shred of possible hangover he might have had vanished when he woke, not to the sound of his alarm, but to the feel of Adalind scrambling out of bed beside him at the crack of dawn.

 

It took him a moment to figure out what had happened but by the time his mind caught up he was already in the bathroom, crouching beside her and holding her hair back while she retched. He’d been around enough for her morning sickness that the smell didn’t bother him anymore. What did bother him was the fact that she was shivering but hot to the touch.

 

‘I really don’t feel good,’ she murmured to him when it seemed the retching had stopped.

 

He grabbed a wash cloth and ran it under cold water and handed it to her to wipe her mouth while he grabbed another one and placed it on the back of her neck, using the clip she sometimes used to keep her hair out of the way. They sat together on the bathroom floor until Adalind was sure she wasn’t going to vomit again and then he helped her to her feet, waited patiently for her to rinse her mouth and gently steered her back to bed.

 

‘Do you want me to make an appointment for the doctor?’ he asked, taking the clip out of her hair and pulling the covers back over her. She was shaking a little but in the dim light of the bedroom he couldn’t tell if her face was flushed. The soft daylight creeping through the loft had been enough light to get to the bathroom and back – they’d both done the trek often enough – but not enough to tell him if she was flushed and glassy eyed.

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘I just need to sleep it off.’ She slipped down further into the bed and murmured, ‘Stay with me?’

 

He slipped in beside her, hoping she’d fall back to sleep but twenty minutes later they were back on the bathroom floor. In the bedroom, his alarm had started to go off but he was ignoring it in favour of staying with Adalind. Her shaking had gotten worse and she was even warmer to the touch. He dug around in the bathroom cabinet and found the digital thermometer she’d purchased at some point for the baby.

 

100.3 degrees. He needed to get her temperature down. He reached over, dropped the plug in the drain and turned on the taps in the bath. He left her on the floor, wrapped around the toilet and snatched his phone off his nightstand, finally silencing the alarm before he set about making some calls.

 

Back in the bathroom, he set his phone on the counter and eased Adalind back to her feet. She was heavier than she would have liked but nowhere near heavy enough that he couldn’t have simply scooped her off the floor if he’d wanted to. She made a face at him that he supposed she meant to be a smile but was more grimace. He placed a kiss on her forehead and started to undress her. She helped as best she could but her movements were sluggish, her hands shaky. She was so hot to the touch, skin slick with sweat that he was glad he’d made an appointment for her to see a doctor.

 

‘You were supposed to be the one waking up sick,’ she complained as he lifted her into the bathtub. She sucked in a sharp breath at the sudden temperature change but slid easily enough into the cool water. ‘I was going to make a point of complaining about it and teasing you.’

 

Nick grinned. ‘Grimm metabolism.’

 

She glared at him. ‘I hope Hank at least has a hangover,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m in the mood to share my pain.’

 

He frowned at that. ‘Are you hurting?’

 

‘I ache all over,’ she moaned in response. ‘The water’s nice, though.’

 

‘Good. I’m going to grab you some water to drink. Do we have anything you can take?’

 

She waved a hand toward the cabinet. ‘The Tylenol is fine,’ she murmured, turning the water off and sinking down into the water as low as she could. ‘And Rosalee gave me some more tea.’

 

Once he’d fetched her a glass of water, the Tylenol and made the tea Rosalee had given her he settled onto the floor beside the bathtub, back against the wall by her feet so he was looking at her. He didn’t say anything as she took the Tylenol just watched her sip at the water until she was apparently satisfied she’d had enough to move on to the tea. She sipped that tentatively at first, like she wasn’t sure if her stomach would be able to handle it and all the while he just watched her. Concerned but content to just sit there with her. The comfortable quiet was a reminder of how far they’d come but also how right this thing between them felt. It was probably why he said what he did next without even thinking.

 

‘Marry me.’

 

Also, probably a good thing Adalind was in the bath, because she sputtered tea everywhere in surprise. ‘What?’ she demanded, with a brief glance of annoyance down at the tea now staining her bath water.

 

Amused, he reached out and swirled a finger through the water, dispersing the tea through the rest of the water. Idly, he wondered if it worked just as well absorbed through the skin as it did when ingested. ‘Not quite the reaction I was going for,’ he said wryly.

 

‘I’m naked in the bath trying to cool a fever!’ Adalind pointed out. ‘You just held my hair while I vomited!’

 

‘I know.’

 

‘I can’t tell people you proposed while I threw up my dinner!’

 

‘I didn’t exactly plan it,’ he defended. Strangely, as annoyed as he was by her response there was no sudden doubt, no second guessing or fear that she’d actually say no. It was a weird thing to realise but whether she said yes or no didn’t actually matter to him in that moment, he hadn’t asked because he wanted to get married right then and there – though, honestly, he would if she did – the words had come out because he was thinking about how much he liked what they had, how much he loved just being with her. The words had just fallen out of his mouth whether he’d wanted them to or not but he wouldn’t take them back. Just because they’d been more or less an accident, didn’t mean he didn’t mean them.

 

‘That’s almost worse!’ Adalind snapped. She put her cup on the edge of the tub and glared at him. He had to fight the urge to laugh because as fearsome as she was under any circumstances, naked, feverish and mad, he loved her so damn much he did it again.

 

‘Marry me.’

 

‘No,’ she snapped.

 

‘Yes,’ he grinned.

 

‘No.’

 

‘I’ll get a ring.’

 

‘You don’t even have a ring?!’

 

‘This wasn’t planned,’ he reminded her.

 

‘No.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Small wedding, just friends, nothing fancy.’

 

‘Still no.’

 

‘I love you.’

 

‘Nice try.’ Her lips twitched. His smile widened in response.

 

‘Marry me.’

 

‘Nope.’

 

He pushed away from the wall, sliding forward until he could more easily reach out to touch her. He didn’t, though. ‘Adalind Burkhardt,’ he murmured, rolling the words around his mouth as though testing them out. He hadn’t been the first one to use them, just the first to say them out loud.

 

‘No.’

 

He inched forward a little more, leaning his head in, smiling when she brought her own forward. He was close enough to kiss her now. He didn’t. ‘Marry me.’

 

She closed the distance between them, kissing him slow and deep. ‘No,’ she spoke against his lips.

 

‘Yes,’ he countered.

 

‘Nick,’ she practically whined his name and he smiled, kissing her again.

 

‘Adalind.’

 

‘No.’

 

He opened his mouth to counter again and was cut off by his phone. He swore, she grinned. Bestowing one more quick kiss on him before he went to answer his phone; he did so with a look that told her this discussion wasn’t over. ‘Burkhardt.’

 

‘I got your message,’ Rosalee told him. ‘We’re on our way.’

 

‘Here?’ Nick asked. ‘You and Monroe?’

 

‘All of us,’ Rosalee replied. ‘We’re bringing breakfast, news and something for Adalind.’

 

‘I’m not sure she’s going to want visitors.’ Nick looked over at Adalind and gave her a questioning look. With the light on and the bath soothing her, she looked a lot better, not great, but she didn’t look like she was going to start vomiting again. She nodded her head slightly and he told Rosalee to text when they were outside.

 

‘Why?’ she asked.

 

‘I’ll need to open the door for you.’

 

If she thought that was strange, she didn’t mention it. He assumed after Monroe had seen the place he would have told her about their weird little fortress. Neither Monroe or Wu had seen beyond the garage though because they’d been so busy unloading boxes and then Hank’s antidote had been ready. His friends had only really had time to quirk their brows at the strange choice of housing but there’d been a lot of treasure being moved and extremely interesting reading material so he could understand there were better things going on than a little tour of his and Adalind’s loft.

 

‘Everyone is on their way and they’re bringing breakfast.’

 

Adalind nodded, like she’d expected that news all along. ‘You should call Bud.’

 

‘Bud?’ Nick asked. ‘Why?’

 

‘I want to talk about renovating.’

 

‘Renovating.’

 

She stood up and he moved to offer her a steadying hand. Her skin was a lot cooler to the touch, though still a little warmer than it should have been. He wrapped her in a nice big towel and tested her temperature again. 99.6. She was still feverish but not nearly as bad as before. Hopefully, the Tylenol, tea and bath had helped to combat the worst of it. He helped her dry off and followed her to the bedroom, wondering if he had time for his own shower before everybody turned up.

 

‘We have a lot of space to work with and I had the perfect idea last night for what to do with it.’

 

Nick took that to mean she’d been looking at the plans for the factory while he’d been getting Hank drunk. He felt like he should have been worried, maybe over the fact there were better ways she could have spent her time last night.

 

‘I also looked into getting some of that treasure valued and sold.’

 

Better ways like that.

 

‘You think we should sell it?’ He was distracted for a moment watching Adalind move slowly around the room as she got dressed. Still tired and not feeling the best but distracted now with something else to focus on. He’d have preferred she crawl back into bed to rest but he’d settle for planting her on the couch under a blanket with more tea and some dry toast.

 

‘We don’t have much use for gold and trinkets,’ she pointed out. ‘We’ll have to go through it and take out anything that has value beyond being pretty and expensive but most of it I think can be sold off. You can split the money between the three of you.’

 

It seemed reasonable enough to him, the items he’d looked at properly while they were moving them hadn’t been particularly interesting to him. He just couldn’t see ever needing a fancy jewel encrusted goblet. Most days he drank his coffee from a chipped novelty mug at work and that suited him just fine. He couldn’t see ever even finding an occasion to drink a nice wine out of such a gaudy piece. Selling it really made the most sense.

 

‘I’m assuming you know someone who could sell this off for us?’

 

Nick nodded, working robbery/homicide did tend to give him a few good ways to sell of the treasure. He knew a few people who wouldn’t ask questions and would give them a fair price. Assuming they didn’t get tied up in the fact that the man selling the pieces was a cop.

 

‘Might have to get Monroe and maybe Trubel to do the actual sale, though.’

 

Adalind grinned. ‘Trubel has that look about her,’ she agreed.

 

‘The one that says she spends most of her time walking the wrong side of the law?’

 

‘That’s the one.’

 

‘It comes in handy,’ mused Nick. ‘She probably knows a few people too, maybe even a few through HW that would be interested in giving us more money for the treasure because of its Grimm history.’

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘I think that would just invite too many questions about where it came from.’

 

‘Especially when you consider HW might have been behind this whole thing to begin with,’ Nick realised. ‘More likely its Black Claw, if anything, but you’re right, we shouldn’t risk HW finding out and coming looking for answers.’

 

‘I’m always right,’ she informed him, with a small smile.

 

‘Couch,’ he told her firmly. She was fully dressed in leggings and a baggy sweater and he motioned her out to the living room. ‘I’ll bring you some more tea and some water but you need to rest.’

 

The fact that she didn’t argue with him told him how bad she was still feeling. He made sure she was comfortable on the couch and then took a quick shower. He was just stepping out when his phone buzzed and he stuck his head out of the bathroom, still rubbing a towel through his hair to snap, ‘Don’t move.’

 

Adalind shot him a dirty look but lowered herself back down onto the couch. She’d managed to grab his phone, though, so she responded to Rosalee’s text for him. He wrapped the towel around his waist and moved to the security monitor. It showed Rosalee’s and Hank’s cars idly out front. He hit the switch to bring the doors open, waited for them both to pull in before he brought the door down again.

 

He’d given Monroe the code to the elevator the day before, so once he’d brought the roller door down again, he hurried up to the bedroom to put some clothes on. When the elevator clanked to a stop and the doors opened he was sitting on the steps that lead up to the bedroom doing up the laces on his boots.

 

‘Hey,’ he called out in greeting.

 

His friends were looking around with interest but Rosalee was the first to speak, smile evident in her voice. ‘It really is a fome.’

 

He gave her a wry grin in response and beckoned them in and over to the table. He shot a finger in Adalind’s direction (aware as he did so of Hank’s gaze) when she looked like she was about to move to join them. ‘Stay,’ he ordered. ‘We’ll come to you.’

 

He didn’t have to look back to know she was rolling her eyes.

 

‘How are you feeling?’ Rosalee asked, placing the bag she was carrying on the coffee table and sinking onto the couch beside Adalind.

 

‘Horrible,’ Adalind assured her with a small smile.

 

They didn’t have enough room for everyone to sit in the living area but they made do, sitting on the floor around the coffee table or dragging chairs across. Josh got the space on the other side of Rosalee and they propped his leg up on a small end table with a cushion under his heel. Hank, looking extremely uncomfortable, dragged a chair over and sat next to Monroe leaving Trubel and Wu to pick a piece of floor around the coffee table.

 

‘Her temperature has dropped,’ Nick elaborated, handing a plate of toast to Adalind. ‘She kept the tea and Tylenol down.’ If she kept the toast down, he’d see about getting her something else.

 

‘Good.’

 

‘I’m fine,’ Adalind told them firmly and unconvincingly. ‘Stop fussing.’

 

‘We’re supposed to fuss.’ Rosalee smiled widely, giving Adalind’s hand a gentle squeeze. She made to pull away but Adalind caught her hand, placing Rosalee’s open palm on her stomach.

 

‘You’re almost as bad as Nick.’

 

Rosalee grinned, unrepentant and rubbed a soothing circle over what Nick thought was probably a foot stamping out for attention. ‘He likes me,’ she said smugly and then to Monroe, ‘I want one.’

 

To his credit, Monroe didn’t look alarmed by Rosalee’s words and Nick grinned across at his friend. ‘I thought she’d at least last until she got to hold him.’

 

‘I don’t need to hold him to know he’s adorable,’ Rosalee dismissed. ‘I bet he’s going to look just like you, Nick.’

 

Hank made a choked sound around a bit of donut that everyone chose to ignore. It had sounded a lot like he was scoffing at the idea but they weren’t about to ruin the light mood by addressing it. Nick might have told Hank the baby was his but he wasn’t sure his partner believed him. He also wasn’t sure, given the amount of alcohol they’d been consuming to cure Hank, that the man remembered all of what they’d discussed. There was probably going to be a repeat of some information as it came up.

 

‘As long as he’s healthy,’ Nick responded with a shrug, deliberately keeping his eyes on Hank. He waited until Hank felt the weight of his gaze before asking how he was doing after being poisoned and cured.

 

‘Man,’ Hank grumbled. ‘I’m too old to drink like that.’

 

Rosalee frowned, ‘Most of the alcohol should have been burned up by the poison. Do you feel hungover?’

 

‘I feel fine.’ He sounded well enough, no longer shaky or leaking strange fluids but he wasn’t completely back to normal. Nick didn’t think he would be for a while, if he ever got back to being the Hank they’d always known. It wasn’t that the poison had changed him, it was that it had allowed certain aspects of his personality to run free. Nick had never known Hank to be quick to anger but he had seen what he could be like when he was scared or didn’t know something. When he’d first seen a wesen he’d flipped out and become aggressive, the poison had brought that out in him again, just with a specific direction.

 

Honestly, they were lucky Hank hadn’t gotten so annoyed and frustrated that he’d simply shot Nick.

 

‘Were you aware of what was happening at all?’ Nick wondered. ‘I know you were deliberately ignoring a lot to begin with, but when they started poisoning you, did you notice? Can you tell us who was poisoning you?’

 

Hank shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I know, Chavez was pretty keen to know everything you were doing but I don’t know if she was the one who poisoned me.’

 

There were plenty of things they wanted to know but Hank couldn’t tell them much. Now that he was willing to share (and capable of being rational) they were hoping he’d have more answers for them but if Chavez had ever told him why they wanted him to rile Nick up he didn’t remember it. If they’d asked him for anything specific about Nick or even asked Hank himself for something, he didn’t remember that either.

 

‘I don’t think they did.’ He didn’t seem a hundred percent sure of that but as he couldn’t think of anything they’d want from him either, Hank seemed to be assuming they hadn’t asked.

 

They discussed HW for a little longer, trying to draw answers out of Hank but the more questions they asked the more it became apparent that Hank had been kept almost completely in the dark, the poison used to keep him pliant and paranoid. Which didn’t seem like a great combination. If anything, it seemed a little counterproductive. It seemed the only way they were going to get anything useful out of HW quickly, was for Nick to confront them himself but none of them liked that idea, it felt too much like giving HW exactly what they wanted.

 

Since they wouldn’t be doing that, it was going to be up to Trubel to learn everything she could.

 

‘They haven’t asked me about Josh, yet,’ she informed them. ‘They know he’s here, they know he’s had contact with you and that I’ve had contact with him. I think,’ she said slowly, ‘that they’re hoping you’ll train him up, teach him to be a Grimm.’

 

‘What’s the point of that?’ Josh demanded. ‘Why go to all the trouble of breaking me and awakening my Grimm abilities if they’re just going to turn me over to Nick? Not that I’m complaining, but why don’t they want me?’

 

Trubel shrugged and looked at him apologetically when she said, ‘You’re not much use to them right now.’

 

‘Which is their own doing,’ Josh pointed out reasonably. ‘It’s going to be a couple of weeks before I can walk without the crutches, let alone take on wesen. Why aren’t they trying to indoctrinate me?’

 

‘It’s a fair question,’ Wu pointed out. ‘They’re wasting valuable time when they could be brainwashing him to be their perfect little Grimm soldier.’

 

‘Maybe that’s the point.’ Adalind sounded thoughtful, as she picked at her toast. Nick frowned at her plate, noticing she hadn’t been able to eat much.

 

‘What’s the point?’ he asked.

 

‘Maybe the point is that they already have good little Grimm soldiers,’ she explained. ‘They already have normal Grimms working for them, the kind that see wesen and kill them, no questions asked. Maybe they want someone who will ask questions, maybe they want a Grimm who is going to be able to look beyond the wesen to get answers.’

 

Trubel shrugged. ‘Yeah, they have “normal” Grimms but they know how to ask questions.’

 

‘They know how to torture wesen or demand answers with death threats,’ Hank corrected.

 

‘They don’t have Grimms they can send to form relationships with wesen,’ Nick said, picking up Hank’s train of thought. ‘You can’t groom someone to become and informant if you kill them as soon as you’re done talking to them.’

 

‘And here you are with wesen friends and a hexenbiest girlfriend,’ Wu continued. ‘Are you saying HW let Josh escape because they want him to be able to form those kinds of relationships?’

 

‘But I could already do that,’ said Josh, putting their confusion into words. ‘I already call wesen friends.’

 

Trubel shook her head. ‘You call them friends but you haven’t really _seen_ many wesen.’

 

‘You lack the experience to know what to expect from certain wesen,’ Rosalee carried the conversation on, this time she was the one to pick up on someone else’s thought. ‘In a way, I can see what you’re saying. HW breaks Josh, they let him come here to Nick where he gets enough training to learn how to deal with most wesen he’s likely to come across and the they, what? Snatch him off the street and force him to work for them?’

 

‘Torture him again,’ Adalind said simply. ‘Josh already knows what they’re capable of, they’re assuming he’ll want to do just about anything to avoid that.’

 

‘We’re assuming too much,’ Nick finally said. ‘We won’t know anything for sure until Trubel can get answers.’

 

‘I’m working on it,’ she assured them. ‘Chavez trusts me but she doesn’t like that I’m close to you.’

 

‘She’s probably wondering if you’re really loyal.’ This from Monroe who was following the conversation with a deep frown on his face. ‘You’ve been doing the jobs she’s assigned you, no questions asked, right?’

 

‘Yeah,’ Trubel confirmed, her words were slow as though she was considering all the ways HW could have been screwing her over this whole time. ‘But so far it’s mostly been monitoring Black Claw agents and taking them out when they become too much of a threat.’

 

‘Who decides whether or not they’re a threat?’ Hank asked.

 

‘Usually Chavez or Meisner.’

 

‘Not you?’ Nick asked. ‘Do you trust Meisner?’

 

This time Trubel shrugged. ‘I guess. More than I trust Chavez.’

 

‘Chavez kidnapped you off the street,’ Josh pointed out. ‘That’s kind of a given.’

 

‘We still haven’t heard from my mom about the resistance,’ Nick said. ‘Do we even know how Meisner ended up working for HW?’

 

‘He’s never said.’

 

‘Does Sean know he’s in town?’ Adalind frowned. ‘Is he in town?’

 

Nick narrowed his eyes at her, she was looking a little green but when he caught her eye and tilted his head in silent question she shook her head gently. She wasn’t great but she wasn’t about to start throwing up again either. That didn’t stop him from getting her a fresh glass of water and some of the new tea Rosalee had brought for her.

 

‘He’s not here in Portland. Yet.’

 

‘It feels like everyone is converging here.’ Monroe sounded unsettled by the prospect.

 

‘Yeah,’ Wu agreed. ‘The question is why?’

 

‘Speaking of “why”, why are you all here?’ Nick didn’t mean to be rude but he genuinely wanted to know why they’d all decided to come visit so early in the morning, especially when, being a weekday, they all had work and places to be.

 

‘The treasure,’ they all spoke at once.

 

Really, Nick should have been expecting that.

 

As they’d been talking, they’d finished up their breakfast so after a brief tidy up and stern instructions that Adalind was to remain in the loft resting, Nick led everyone else back into the elevator and down into the garage. His last look at Adalind told him that as much as she’d protested the need for her to stay behind, she was grateful he’d been the one to demand she stay put. He had no doubt that once they’d all moved back down to the garage she would crawl back into bed to try and sleep away whatever bug she’d caught.

 

Just before he dragged down the grate he promised he would look in on her again before he left for work. Assuming he even went to work. He’d planned to take Adalind to her appointment with the doctor but if everyone else was planning to spend the day lurking in the big open warehouse space attached to his garage then he thought Rosalee could take her if work came up. He knew Adalind wouldn’t mind Rosalee being there with her, she didn’t seem to mind being weak in front of the fuchsbau. It was a sign of the growing friendship and trust between them.

 

Rosalee and Josh both made appreciative noises when they entered the space and saw all the books and treasure waiting to be explored but Hank held back, motioning for Nick to hang back to speak with him. ‘I’m sorry man, I know I said it last night, but I want you to know, I _am_ sorry.’

 

‘I know.’ He did know. There might have been some things he was doing in his life that Hank didn’t agree with but Nick knew no matter how much Hank wanted to, he would never have taken it as far the physical blows he’d been gearing up for before the poison really took hold.

 

‘A lot of the things I said, I didn’t mean them.’

 

‘You meant some of them, though.’

 

Hank didn’t look ashamed when he nodded, acknowledging that not all his behaving was unexpected. His partner wasn’t ashamed to admit to some of it, but he wouldn’t take responsibility for all of it either.

 

‘I don’t get this thing you have with Adalind,’ Hank said quietly, the words wholly unsurprising to Nick. ‘I know you explained it last night, how you became friends and that but it’s going to take me a while before I can trust that she’s not playing with you.’

 

‘I get that,’ Nick assured him, unfazed by Hanks reluctance. ‘I don’t expect you to like her, not yet, not after the way she used you, but I’d like you to try, to get to know her.’

 

Hank nodded and this time it was Nick who held him back from entering the treasure room.

 

‘The things you said about my being a Grimm – ’

 

Hank cut him off before he could properly form the question. ‘You have this way of dealing with this stuff,’ Hank explained. ‘You just take it, deal with it, move on, I get that, I do. I just, when I became a cop I wanted to protect the public, uphold the law. Now there’s a whole other side to the law, worse than the grey in between. I’ve overlooked things before,’ Hank admitted, ‘but they were smaller, petty crimes, things that weren’t worth the paperwork or that I overlooked in favour of getting information on something bigger and worse but being a Grimm, dealing with wesen, that’s not just turning a blind eye to a little recreational drug use, or the wife who killed her husband after years of abuse. Sometimes, it’s cold blooded murder.’

 

Nick thought about all of the bodies he and Adalind had buried out in the woods, all of the bodies he and Monroe had hidden away before (and after) that. He had a lot of blood on his hands but he’d never felt like those deaths weren’t justified. Each time he’d killed it had been to protect someone, whether that someone was himself or someone he loved. Even luring those members of the Verrat into an ambush hadn’t felt like murder, he’d never really had to justify it before.

 

He got what Hank was saying, understood where his partner was coming from but while Hank took a step back from the situation and saw all the things they could have done differently, Nick saw only that he’d done what was right, what was necessary.

 

‘Is this going to be a problem for you?’

 

Hank sighed. ‘Nah, I just wanted you to understand.’

 

Nick nodded, in his pocket his phone chirped, alerting him to an incoming message. He didn’t answer it straight away, drawing it out of his pocket but waiting to see if Hank had something to add but his partner only shook his head and turned into the room, letting out an impressed whistle when he saw the boxes and boxes of Grimm treasure.

 

The message was from Adalind and he had to read it through twice before he realised what it was. Just a single word, a response to a conversation they’d been having over an hour before.

 

_Yes._


	28. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team get some answers but they come with more questions.

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 26**

It took every bit of self-control Nick had to step into that room and not turn around and high tail it back up to the loft. He’d asked on a whim, asked because in that moment, sitting beside the tub while she shivered with fever, he’d realised that he could happily (easily) spend the rest of his life with Adalind. Now she’d said yes and he couldn’t do any of the things he wanted to do to celebrate. Ideally, he’d go back up to the loft and take his time showing her exactly what she meant to him, exactly what her answer meant to him.

 

Agreeing to marry him deserved a full day in bed alternating between slow languorous sex and fast and destructive need-a-new-headboard sex. Neither of which he’d be getting even if he did go back upstairs because Adalind was sick and needed her rest and he was stuck going through boxes in the warehouse attached to their garage.

 

Nick let his head flop back and let out a groan before he steeled himself to disappointment and joined his friends in the next room. It wasn’t much of a space, big and open as it was, the only thing making it secure enough to store the treasure was the spell that he and Adalind had placed around their property. If they were going to keep the books and other useful items here at the factory, then the security was going to need a serious upgrade. He wasn’t comfortable relying on Henrietta’s spell, it seemed like they were leaving too much to chance.

 

After all, there were ways around spells and protections, no reason he couldn’t make them really work for it. He assumed Adalind had been thinking along the same lines and that was why she’d asked him to call and invite Bud. He assumed she wanted to use him for his connections – the eisbiber did seem to know everyone. The problem wasn’t finding someone to do the work it was finding someone to do the work who wouldn’t pass on their location.

 

He’d have to ask Henrietta what she did when something broke in her house. As capable as she seemed, he didn’t imagine she dealt with her own plumbing issues.

 

‘Do you think something in one of these books can tell us who killed Dobrini?’ Hank asked, picking up a book at random when he saw Nick come in.

 

Nick shook his head. ‘I think this is exactly what Adalind said it was – a Grimm treasure trove guarded by wesen who worshipped Grimms. This treasure is the reason Dobrini was killed, I’m sure of it, but I don’t think it will tell us who did it.’

 

‘What do you want to do with it?’ Rosalee asked of the three Grimms in the room.

 

‘We sort it,’ Nick answered promptly. ‘For now, we go through the treasure and the weapons looking for anything that we can use or is too dangerous to sell.’

 

It was easier said than done. When they’d brought all the treasure and books inside the day before, they stashed them against the interior wall off to one side. Nick didn’t know what was on the other side of the wall just yet but he’d figured it was safer than placing them closest to the spell line that ran around the outside of the property. There’d already been a worn set of table and chairs in the room and that was where Josh had situated himself. They each took a basket of treasure and started to separate the items inside into piles by the door, one to keep and one to sell and a third pile which filled faster than they would have liked with items they didn’t know what to do with. This was the pile Adalind would need to go through when she was feeling up to it. Just on look and feel alone, none of them could tell if those items in the third pile were more than they appeared.

 

Most of the basket Nick went through first was gaudy jewellery that deserved to be in a museum. It was chunky, expensive and ugly, the kind of thing designed to show off someone’s wealth but not their taste. The only thing he saved from the basket was a long gold chain with a teardrop shaped diamond – not because it was pretty and he thought Adalind would like it but because every time he held it his fingers went numb and pins and needles spread up his arms. He set that one carefully aside for Adalind to look at later and returned to the wall to get another basket.

 

The next one was a lot more interesting. It contained a layer of gaudy jewellery on top and an interesting selection of knives beneath. Nick only gave the jewellery a cursory once over to make sure none of it was like the numbing necklace before he started pulling out the knives. A set of throwing knives, the handles wrapped in soft black leather, perfectly balanced and the sign of the Grimm pressed into the blade near the hilt, came out first, followed by a stiletto with a dulled blade and a dozen knives of different shapes and sizes. All of them were stamped with the mark of the Grimm and went straight into the keep pile.

 

Worryingly, the keep pile was larger than the pile of items to be sold, though as he dropped the knives onto it he noticed that was because most of the items they were keeping were weapons. There seemed to be only a handful of jewellery that had made the cut. Still, the pile to keep might have been the biggest but the potentially dangerous one they needed Adalind to look over was still bigger than the pile to sell. It was a start but not a great one.

 

Wu’s phone rang some time between the fourth and fifth basket and Nick paused digging through what seemed to be a silver cutlery set to glance up at his friends. Monroe and Rosalee were examining one of the locked trunks, searching for a way to open it, Trubel was elbow deep in one of the unlocked ones while Hank and Josh seemed to be trying to figure out the purpose and value of a carved oak stick that had been stained and was well cared for but didn’t seem to be a walking stick or a weapon.

 

‘That was the lab,’ Wu announced. ‘They found a match on the prints CSU got from the secret library wall, the ones they took from the symbol on the wall – they’re Fuentes’.’

 

‘Fuentes?’ Nick repeated. ‘Doesn’t that just seem a little too tidy?’

 

‘When the match came through they ran the paint used on the wall and in the other killings – it doesn’t match and the experts think they were painted by separate people.’

 

‘So, the lab is where Fuentes got the idea for the Grimm symbol but not where he first painted it,’ Nick recapped. ‘We suspected that anyway, there’s nothing new there.’

 

‘It’s not the fingerprints that’s important though,’ Wu went on. ‘They also found a match between some fibres taken from Dobrini’s lungs and the clothes one of Fuentes’ original victims was wearing.’

 

‘What?’ That did come as a surprise to Nick.

 

‘The bodies found under the house Fuentes was staying in, one of them belonged to a man, the sweater he was wearing had pollen from a particular plant stuck on the sleeve and that same pollen was found on cotton fibres in Dobrini’s lungs.’

 

‘Are you saying that one of Fuentes’ victims killed Dorbini?’ Like Nick, Hank was frowning at this news.

 

‘That’s how it looks,’ Wu confirmed. ‘The lab is going to compare samples they have of tissue taken from underneath that victims nails but I’m guessing it’s going to be a match for Dobrini.’

 

‘So Fuentes killed the killer?’ Monroe seemed sceptical and Nick couldn’t blame him. It seemed too tidy, having the man who committed the murder dead, and the man who killed the killer behind bars.

 

‘We’re going to need to talk to Fuentes.’

 

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Hank told him, he was looking down at his phone with a grim expression. ‘I just checked my email,’ he explained. ‘There’s one here from this morning from the prison warden, Fuentes was killed overnight by his cell mate.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘His cell mate who happens to be the one member of the wesenrein you let live.’

 

The sound that came from Nick then was more animal than human, a frustrated angry sound that summed up nicely how they all felt about this news.

 

Hank wasn’t finished, he squinted down at his phone in disbelief before he added, ‘And the cell mate killed himself afterward and left this on the wall.’

 

He turned his phone around so they could all look but the feeling of dread in Nick’s stomach told him what he would see before he even looked. Marked on the wall using Fuentes’ blood were the claw marks that represented Black Claw.

 

‘The warden’s team wrote it off as nothing more than a threat, painting the wall in Fuentes’ blood,’ Hank finished. ‘They’re not looking into it because, according to the guards on duty, Fuentes and our wesenrein buddy got into it the day before over Fuentes’ personal items.’

 

Nick considered what they knew and what they didn’t and was displeased (though not surprised) to find that what they didn’t know far outweighed what they did. It was just all too tidy and the picture being painted was one that showed Black Claw had been around and active in the city longer than they’d realised and that the fact that they were starting to make open moves suggested they were ready for their plan to go into motion.

 

‘So, Black Claw hires a man to find the treasure Dobrini is watching over. When he doesn’t get what he wants from her, he kills her. I’m guessing the fact that Fuentes’ prints were in the room means they went to confront Dobrini together. So, then what? Black Claw gives Fuentes the order to kill his partner, stage the Grimm calling card and then when they finally get our attention they have one of their wesenrein men off him in prison so he can’t talk?’

 

‘Then why leave the Black Claw calling card?’ Josh asked. ‘If you want to stop us from linking it all together why even leave the message letting us know it was about Black Claw?’

 

‘Because the message isn’t for us,’ Nick realised. ‘It’s for HW.’ He turned to Trubel. ‘Do HW have someone monitoring for this kind of thing?’

 

She nodded. ‘Yeah, they’ve got a bunch of tech guys scanning through news and emails and stuff. As soon as those photos from Fuentes’ cell were uploaded they’d have alerted HW. Especially if they were already monitoring his cell mate.’

 

This raised an interesting question, one Nick thought could be used to their advantage if it turned out to be true. ‘What if Black Claw wasn’t trying to get out attention at all?’ He posed the question knowing that if it were true it was almost worse. ‘What if the Grimm they were trying to call was the one working for HW?’

 

‘You think the calling card was for Trubel?’ Josh asked.

 

‘Not necessarily,’ Nick replied. ‘You said HW has other Grimms working for them. What if we’re looking at this wrong? What if the original attack on Dobrini was for the treasure, then the calling of the Grimms followed because they were hoping to attract the attention of a Grimm who could tell them where the treasure was? Fuentes knew there was a Grimm in Portland but anyone asking around would know that I’m relatively new at this. I have a reputation for killing whoever gets in my way but only if they try to kill me first.

 

‘Would Black Claw know that I didn’t know about the treasure?’

 

Trubel nodded suddenly. ‘Hey, yeah, the trailer. Fuentes was tracking you through the woods, that night, right? You and Adalind caught him snooping around.’

 

‘Adalind was with you that night?’ Hank asked. ‘Never mind,’ he added when they all turned to look at him wondering if now was really the time.

 

‘He tracked you to the trailer looking for the treasure but he didn’t count on Adalind, on you being as strong as you are.’

 

‘He tried to pretend he was being chased,’ Nick remembered. ‘He only attacked us when he realised we weren’t buying his act.’

 

‘Are you suggesting this whole thing has been about this treasure?’ Rosalee looked around at the treasure. ‘What were they expecting to find?’

 

They looked around the room at the piles of treasure they’d already been through and the trunk and boxes they still had to go. Somewhere in this room there was something that Black Claw was killing for. They just had to find what it was.

 

That also proved to be easier said than done.

 

At one point Rosalee went to check on Adalind and take her to her appointment, leaving Nick to stare after her a beat too long wishing he could have been the one to go but Rosalee was perfectly capable of checking on Adalind and could likely provide more help to recover than he could. Sex would, after all, wear her out and he didn’t imagine celebratory sex would have a healing effect just because they were celebrating good news.

 

Because she had agreed to marry him and he was still stuck downstairs sorting through treasure and weapons looking for something that would hopefully make sense of the Black Claw attacks the moment they saw it. He wasn’t feeling hopeful about that. Especially when, the trunk he looked through proved to have nothing more exciting than a full suit of armour, complete with sword, helmet and dents from battle.

 

Honestly, by the time his phone rang around eleven he was almost happy to receive a phone call from Renard. Almost. And that almost was pushing it when Renard explained that he’d finally gotten some useful news out of Europe regarding the Royals and the Resistance.

 

‘My cousin Viktor has been sending the wesen to kill you,’ he informed Nick and the room as Nick had put his phone on speaker. ‘He didn’t exactly put a bounty on your head but he’s made it known he has an interest in seeing you dead and that anyone who can provide proof of your death will be rewarded.’

 

‘Are you saying only the Royals are sending people after me?’

 

‘No,’ Renard replied. ‘Viktor has sent people after you but so has Kenneth and there are other factions working on their own, the Reapers were coming for you anyway, left over orders from Erik and it seems what remains of the Resistance is coming for you as well.’

 

That was surprising news. ‘The Resistance? Why?’

 

‘I don’t know.’ Renard sounded annoyed that there was something he hadn’t been able to get answers to. ‘The Resistance used to work off rumours and scraps they could glean from the Verrat and the royal families. Someone else is feeding them new information.’

 

‘Have you heard from Meisner?’ Nick asked. ‘He was your contact within the Resistance, wasn’t he?’

 

‘No one has heard from Meisner in months, not since he helped Adalind escape Austria.’

 

Nick exchanged a loaded look with his friends, wondering if Renard had an ulterior motive for bringing up Adalind but he didn’t ask about her or mention her again as he went through all the information he’d been able to glean from those contacts still willing to talk to him. It was the first time Nick had regretted how little influence Renard actually had with the Royals. The ability to tell them to back off would have been really handy just about then.

 

Especially when it came to updating Renard on the Dobrini case.

 

‘You think this Black Claw was after something Dobrini had and that’s what started this whole thing?’ Renard’s scepticism was warranted given that Nick hadn’t actually mentioned the treasure during his explanation. Although, given that Nick and his friends knew about the treasure and still hadn’t found anything they thought Black Claw would kill for, Renard’s scepticism was well deserved.

 

‘Are you suggesting Black Claw had Fuentes killed because they have what they were looking for?’

 

The state of the door and lock concealing the treasure room told Nick that Black Claw didn’t have what they were looking for but he wasn’t about to tell Renard that, not to mention they were still only working under the _assumption_ that was the case.

 

‘I don’t know,’ was all he could tell Renard. ‘It’s all just a little too clean.’

 

‘I don’t like it,’ Renard stated the obvious. ‘There are too many things we don’t know.’

 

Nick didn’t feel that required a response but Renard didn’t seem to need one.

 

‘I think it’s time I talk to my mother.’

 

‘What?’ Why would Renard decide now was a great time to bring his mother up? The last time they’d spoken of the woman it had been when she’d learned about Diana’s existence and had been making noise about wanting to meet her. Given nobody but Nick’s mom knew where Diana was that request had been ignored by everyone. Including, as far as Nick could tell, Renard.

 

‘She always had a certain influence over my father,’ Renard explained. ‘She might be able to get something out of him my spies can’t. She also may know something about Black Claw. Her prior position as the King’s mistress makes her desirable to anyone trying to bring down the King.’

 

‘You think Black Claw might have approached her?’

 

‘I don’t know.’

 

Nick wished that wasn’t the answer to most of their questions. Even having solved Dobrini’s murder well enough to satisfy a court didn’t resolve most of their unanswered questions. It was pushing him closer and closer to simply walking in to HW with Trubel and demanding answers.

 

He didn’t entertain the thought for long, though. After ending the call with Renard, he picked the lock on the last trunk and went back to sorting through the junk inside. Monroe offered to go on a food run to get some lunch but Rosalee and Adalind returned just when they were contemplating what to get and they didn’t return empty handed. What exactly they’d brought, Nick didn’t notice right away because his eyes found Adalind’s and the grin she gave him drove all thought of food out of his mid.

 

She still looked a little flushed and shaky but definitely better than she’d been earlier. He wanted to walk up to her, scoop her up and drag her upstairs but instead he had to limit his dramatics to sliding his hand across her cheek and into her hair as he looked her over.

 

‘How are you feeling?’ He didn’t much care if the others noticed the heat in his gaze or the way his eyes dropped down to her lips even when he told himself he wasn’t going to be able to do anything with his desire. She’d said yes, though his brain and heart were battling a bit over the appropriate course of action.

 

His head won out. Barely.

 

‘Better,’ she told him. ‘Not great.’

 

He nodded, letting her know he expected as much. ‘We’ve left you a nice pile of treasure to sort through if you’re up for it.’

 

She nodded. ‘I’m sick of sitting around in bed doing nothing.’

 

‘Food first, then treasure.’

 

Over lunch (which they ate standing around the table – Adalind got the second chair), they discussed what needed to be done to make the old paint factory more secure. The location, as Hank pointed out, was great and the spell to keep them hidden worked even better for being so out of the way (Wu pointed this out) but the factory itself, despite all of the cameras and alarms Nick had set up was still just a factory and it lacked the kind of security it would need to keep such a treasure safe.

 

‘Plus, Diana and the baby are going to need to be protected,’ Rosalee pointed out.

 

‘Maybe you would be better building a fortress out in the woods?’ Wu suggested, only half joking. ‘You’ve got the land the trailer is on.’

 

‘It’s too isolated,’ Nick replied. ‘If something ever happens, there’s nowhere for us to go, just into the woods.’

 

‘There isn’t really anywhere for you to go here, either,’ Hank pointed out.

 

‘Nah,’ Trubel informed him, ‘They’ve got the escape tunnel here.’

 

Hank’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Escape tunnel?’

 

‘We still don’t know where it goes, though,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘And it’s not easy for me to get up and down the ladder at the moment.’

 

‘Two more months and then you’ll be holding a baby too,’ Rosalee pointed out.

 

Adalind shook her head at that. ‘I’m not actually worried about that. Strapping a baby to your chest and climbing down a ladder is a lot easier than trying to navigate around a giant belly.’

 

‘It’s not giant,’ Nick said automatically, prompted by numerous bouts of hormone induced panics by Adalind. ‘You’re beautiful.’

 

Monroe and Wu snorted but Rosalee gave a gentle laugh. Hank looked vaguely like he wanted to be sick but heroically held it back.

 

‘Oh, shut up,’ Nick snapped, unashamed.  He bestowed a kiss on Adalind when she grinned up at him and went back to the original topic. ‘I like the idea of strengthening this place. Of turning it into somewhere we can really be safe.’

 

‘The door’s will need reinforcing,’ Wu said. ‘Probably some of the walls too.’

 

‘We need more bedrooms,’ Adalind contributed. ‘There’s enough space for two or three more upstairs if we extend the loft out over the factory floor.’

 

‘You could put another couple of rooms down here, too,’ Monroe moved to poked his head through the door beside the untouched piles of books. He tried the handle but though it wasn’t locked, the door didn’t budge. He put his shoulder into it and the door moved open a few inches. ‘Dude, this place is huge. And dirty. Very, very dirty.’

 

‘I think you found the leftover paint stores.’ Adalind wrinkled her nose and Monroe hastily tugged the door closed. ‘We could build a proper library in here,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Shelves, desks, an actual system to this madness so we don’t have to waste so much time digging through books at random in the trailer.’

 

‘I could do that,’ Josh volunteered. ‘It’s not like I have a job to go to.’

 

Nick nodded, the image taking shape in his mind was one that screamed family home, albeit said family home really embraced Adalind’s “fome” concept but he like the idea of having something nice and family friendly on the inside and cold and unassuming on the outside. Looking at the gaudy treasure they’d been sorting through, he doubted money would be an issue, even once they’d split the money between the three of them, maybe even with a share going to Monroe and Rosalee, Wu and Hank.

 

‘You could have one of our guest rooms,’ Adalind offered. ‘Assuming we actually get one built. You can’t stay with Monroe and Rosalee indefinitely. We could probably create a separate guest apartment down here.’

 

Adalind had a glint in her eye that suggested whatever plans Nick had for the space were nothing compared to what Adalind was seeing. He had no doubts that now that she was really thinking and planning that he would have that “fome” he’d been imagining. Even the idea of a small separate apartment on the ground floor sat well with him. Josh would eventually get his own place and not necessarily in Portland, the room would come in handy if (when) his mother ever came back.

 

Wu’s phone buzzed. ‘That’s the lab results. It’s like we thought, Fuentes and his victim must have gone after Dobrini, Fuentes cleans up after his partner gets a little trigger happy and then Fuentes himself gets killed in his cell by a Black Claw puppet.’

 

‘At least we can give Dobrini’s family some kind of closure,’ Hank observed.

 

‘Her son doesn’t seem like the kind to ask questions,’ Monroe observed. ‘I don’t think he’s going to care much more beyond that.’

 

‘He won’t,’ Nick agreed. ‘We don’t have to worry about the family asking difficult questions and I don’t think her friends will either. If any of them ask we can just say she got killed for a book or a spell she was supposed to be making.’

 

They finished up lunch talking about nothing in particular and then Nick cleared away the remains of their lunch while Rosalee dropped the small tub of items they weren’t too sure about on the table in front of Adalind.

 

Loveable nerd that she was, Adalind looked delighted by the prospect of digging through spelled, cursed or drugged treasure. That could have been the bug she had talking but sick or not, Adalind loved learning new things and digging through a stash of powerful objects was her idea of a good time.

 

He handed her a pair of gloves just in case some of the objects were coated in poison and dropped a bemused kiss on the top of her head just because, frankly, she looked adorable snapping on the gloves and diving right in. Moments later her hiss of satisfaction told him she’d found something she thought interesting.

 

Her enthusiastic murmurs and explanations to Josh formed the background to his continued search through the last trunk. He found nothing at all in the trunk that would suggest Black Claw had an interest in it. It was mostly filled with old letters and papers that he just knew Adalind and Monroe would love reading through. He waved his friend over and showed him the letters.

 

Predictably, Monroe started sorting through them interestedly, separating them by date and language where he could. Nick decided it would be a good time to call Bud and perhaps Henrietta before they started on the books. Bud knew plenty of people, Adalind had been right about that but he freely admitted that, although he trusted the people he would recommend to do the work, he didn’t know whether or not they would be able to keep his home a secret under pressure.

 

Henrietta didn’t answer her phone so he left a quick message explaining what he wanted and also letting her know that the treat Black Claw posed seemed to be growing.

 

‘Uh, guys,’ Monroe called out, voice filed with cautious excitement.

 

Nick hung up on Henrietta’s voicemail and moved back to Monroe and the trunk of letters. He’d emptied the whole thing out onto the floor but he wasn’t looking at the letters, he was looking at the bottom of the trunk and the small concealed compartment he’d found.

 

‘Are those what I think they are?’ Trubel broke the silence.

 

Lying on a velvet cushion on the bottom of the trunk were two keys. Two keys that looked very much like the one his aunt had given him and the one they’d found in Josh’s father’s cane. Tentatively, Monroe reached in and removed the two keys, handing one to Nick while he pulled an eye glass from his pocket and closely examined the other.

 

Studying the key closely, Nick could make out the impressions on the side, just like there was on the keys he already had. ‘This is the same,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the keys the Royals have been looking for.’

 

‘This isn’t,’ Monroe said. ‘This one’s different.’

 

‘What?’ Nick handed the key he was holding to Trubel and took the one Monroe handed him. The difference was subtle but looking closely, he could see what Monroe had seen under the magnifying lenses he was wearing. Both keys were engraved with an image but there were subtle differences between the two.

 

‘We need ink and paper.’

 

Nick had to go up to the loft for it and when he came back down he found Adalind holding three more keys. ‘There are more?’ His eyes moved around each of the seven trunks they’d thought to have been emptied. ‘How many?’

 

‘Nine,’ Rosalee informed him. She was standing at the table peering down over Monroe’s shoulder as he examined a pile – an honest to god pile – of black keys.

 

‘There are only two that match the original set,’ Monroe declared after careful scrutiny of each individual key. ‘I think there are three different maps here.’

 

‘Three?’ Nick repeated, surprised. ‘To what?’

 

‘I’ve never heard any rumours about other maps.’ Adalind was examining the keys one after the other. ‘Only the story the Royals like to tell about the Grimm knights burying their treasure and creating this map. Do you think those same knights made more maps? Hid more treasure?’

 

‘I don’t know.’ Nick placed the paper and ink he’d brought down on the table and watched carefully as Monroe selected a key, pressed it into the ink pad and then stamped it down onto the paper. The small section it printed showed vastly different terrain to the ones he’d seen before. This one showed no mountains or rivers.

 

When Monroe had stamped each of the keys out onto the paper they were left with sections of, as Monroe had said, three different maps. Each map had been made by the same mapmaker but showed different geography. The original key depicted a forest, another a flat area with minimal landmarks that Nick thought might be a desert and the third looked like an old city.

 

‘Wow,’ Rosalee breathed out in awe.

 

‘Three maps, three treasures,’ Wu said. ‘And no idea what your ancestors hid.’

 

‘Nope,’ Nick answered, eyes still glued to the maps. ‘I have no idea.’


	29. Chapter 27

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 27**

 

Three days after he proposed, Nick dragged himself home from work exhausted after spending the entire day chasing a suspect all over Portland. All he wanted to do was have a nice hot shower, some food and sleep – possibly for a week. The fact that a large portion of his exhaustion could be blamed on a lack of sleep the previous night (Adalind had finally kicked her bug) was the only reason he’d had a smile on his face all day.

 

Both Hank and Wu had noticed his good mood despite the exhaustion and where Hank had managed to hide his grimace Wu took the time to make a snarky remark about Adalind being well enough once more to wear him out. Nick might have grinned unrepentantly at that which contributed to the slightly queasy look on Hank’s face but he was taking it as his right to get Hank used to Adalind by acting as though he already was.

 

That didn’t mean he wasn’t looking forward to a nice quiet night involving lots of sleep. However, when he pulled up in front of the roller door and pressed the button to open the garage nothing happened. When he pushed the button on the remote again and still nothing happened he gave an annoyed grunt and phoned Adalind.

 

‘Can you open the garage?’ he asked, ‘My remote isn’t working.’

 

‘I know,’ she told him and there was a strange note in her voice. ‘You’re going to love this.’

 

‘Love what?’ he asked suspiciously.

 

But Adalind only issued a, ‘Hang on,’ and then over the phone he heard the soft sounds of her feet padding across the loft floor before there was a series of near silent beeps and the roller door in front of him started to glide upward.

 

That he was expecting. What he wasn’t expecting were the reinforced blast doors that slid aside behind the garage door. For a moment, he thought he had imagined them, that his exhaustion was making him see things, but a couple of quick blinks didn’t clear them away. Confused, and a little impressed, Nick rolled his Land Cruiser into the garage. The elevator doors opened as he cut the engine and Adalind moved to greet him. They both turned to watch the roller door glide down and the _blast doors_ slide closed.

 

‘Uh,’ Nick said, mind momentarily going blank in his surprise. ‘Where did they come from?’

 

‘Neat, huh?’ Adalind replied smugly. ‘They’re a gift from Henrietta.’

 

‘A gift,’ Nick repeated. He moved forward to place a hand against the doors, feeling the unresisting material cool beneath his hands. So many questions he wanted to ask, prominent among them being why did Henrietta have a set of reinforced doors to gift to them in the first place which was tying a nice first with the burning questions of when and how.

 

‘Well, technically they’re a taster.’

 

‘A what?’ Nick turned back around to face her, expression clearly saying he required a better and more thorough explanation as soon as possible.

 

‘Henrietta knows some very strange people in some very strange places,’ Adalind explained. ‘When I finally got hold of her the day before yesterday she said she’d have to make some arrangements.’

 

‘Arrangements.’

 

‘Yes,’ Adalind agreed. ‘She asked what we wanted to do with the factory and how much security we wanted. I emailed her a copy of the plans and this morning she called me and said she wanted to stop by because she had something to show me.’

 

‘Henrietta did this?’ Nick looked from the doors back to Adalind, disbelief clear on his face. ‘In a couple of hours?’

 

Adalind laughed. ‘No, she had a team with her. They were creepy, actually. She has them under her control at all times. They come in, do the work for her and then go home without any memory of where they’ve been or what they did all day.’

 

That sounded horribly unethical to Nick but his eyes kept straying to the shiny new doors and he couldn’t help but think it was exactly what they needed. Hadn’t he called her for that exact reason? Hadn’t he reached out to her because he knew that she’d have some way around people knowing where she lived even when she needed work done?

 

With this thought in mind, Nick asked, ‘What else?’

 

Adalind led the way back to the elevator and once they were back in the loft she spread the plans of their factory out on the table before she overlaid them with a newer set. The original plans showed the garage directly beneath the loft and the open warehouse space beside it with a corridor and a series of small rooms branching off the warehouse space and spread behind that and the garage. The loft only sat above the garage and a small portion of the back-office space that was directly behind the garage.

 

The new plans showed something entirely different.

 

Somehow, the lines and angles on the blueprints helped to form a perfect image in Nick’s mind, showing the garage becoming larger and more open, angled parking spaces off to the side with enough room for three cars kept clear of the doors. The elevator would be fitted with a new set of doors that opened out onto the office space behind the garage so you could have the option of walking almost straight through the elevator cage to the new, contained apartment, or taking it up to the loft. The plans Henrietta had had drawn up then showed the loft being extended over the warehouse space just as Adalind had pictured, creating space for three extra rooms, another bathroom and a laundry with an enclosed roof top garden that, unlike the small one they currently had, would be enclosed on all four sides by their new expanded loft.

 

‘It’ll be a nice safe place for our kids to play outside without prying eyes spotting them,’ Adalind murmured, tracing the space with her fingers.

 

With the new loft spread out over the warehouse area, the room would have the door to the back-office-turned-apartment removed, leaving it with the only door the one leading into the garage. The new, lower ceiling would make it easier to heat the space and in Nick’s head it became a cross between the trailer as it was now and the side room of Rosalee’s shop.

 

‘Can Henrietta’s people really do this?’

 

‘She says they can,’ Adalind looked up at him, her expression hopeful. ‘The project manager said he’s never done anything on this scale before but he thinks they can have it done in a couple of months.’

 

‘Really?’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘I think we should do it. Our lives aren’t getting any safer and it would be good to have somewhere safe for our children to grow.’

 

Adalind wanted this new “fome” Henrietta had helped her create and if he were honest, Nick wanted it too. The problem was that as much as he trusted Henrietta to have found ways to keep herself safe he still felt uncomfortable letting the number of people needed to make this happen inside their home. It was a lot of people, a lot of things that could go wrong.

 

‘I’ll talk to Henrietta, meet the people who will be building this.’ Nick hoped the expression on his face told Adalind how much he wanted this, too. ‘If I think we can trust them to do this, we’ll do it.’

 

‘I knew you’d say that,’ Adalind smiled up at him. ‘I made an appointment for you to meet them tomorrow before work.’

 

Nick looked at the plans again. ‘This is going to take a lot of money.’

 

‘I know. We’ll need to sell a lot of that treasure.’

 

Nick nodded. After Adalind had been through the items they couldn’t identify they’d ended up with a pile of trinkets to sell that was far larger than the one of items they wanted or had to keep. Some of the things they’d deemed dangerous Adalind and Rosalee had been able to clean of their spells and poisons until the only objects left were the really important and powerful ones. Some of it he didn’t think was worth much but there were a lot of ugly pieces in their that someone would pay a lot for even if it was just so they could strip out the stones and reset them.

 

They’d find out soon enough how much they could get for the treasure, Monroe and Trubel were meeting with a buyer tomorrow who’s ties to the wesen community had come as a surprise to Nick but definitely worked in their favour. Trubel’s nature as a Grimm and Monroe’s reputation as a Grimm-friendly blutbad had cast an authenticity to the treasure that, apparently, had buyers clamouring to get hold of the items. Nick had a feeling their quick plans to turn over the treasure were going to become elaborate plans to host an underground wesen auction.

 

Which might draw the attention of Black Claw.

 

And now he had an idea he really didn’t like but one he thought could bring them closer to finding out just who exactly Black Claw was and what they wanted in the long run – aside from the apparent desire to come out to the world. Just because he needed someone else to tell him it was a terrible idea, he voiced the thought aloud to Adalind.

 

‘You’re right,’ she told him. ‘It’s a terrible idea.’

 

Nick sighed, he wanted to take her words at face value but the way she was looking at him said otherwise. ‘We should do it.’

 

‘We really should,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not like we need to host and run the auction, just send Monroe and Rosalee in to have a good look around.’

 

‘Assuming they agree to it.’

 

Adalind gave him a look that asked if he really thought their friends were likely to turn down an opportunity to get more information on Black Claw. ‘Your mother would be perfect for this,’ she reflected. ‘No one really knows anything about her, most people still think she’s dead.’

 

Nick nodded. The idea of sending his mom to sit in on an auction to look for potential Black Claw spies sounded a lot more appealing than letting Monroe and Rosalee go, only because he knew no one would be expecting to see Kelly Burkhardt whereas anyone keeping watch over Nick would recognise Monroe and Rosalee.

 

‘I still haven’t heard from her.’ He was starting to worry now, she’d been good at checking in since she’d taken off with Diana, this was the longest he’d gone without hearing from her and he had to keep reminding himself that he’d gone without contact from her for years and years when he’d thought she was dead. A matter of weeks was nothing to get hung up on.

 

Telling himself that didn’t mean he worried any less, though.

 

Despite the worry and the new plans formulating, Nick was exhausted and after a quick bite of dinner he went to bed. He woke up eight hours later to the sound of his alarm going off. Rolling over to switch it off, he realised Adalind must have set it when she’d joined him, though he didn’t recall what time she’d followed him to bed. He’d been dead asleep, exhausted from a late-night and a long day but now he was wired, the plans he’d started putting together had taken a firmer shape in his mind overnight so he was eager to be up and getting on with things.

 

In bed beside him, Adalind stretched and propped herself up on her elbows. She eyed him for a moment, eyes raking over his sleep ruffled hair, bare chest and bright eyes and smiled fondly. Simply because he could, he leant over and placed a lingering kiss on her lips before pulling away and bestowing another on her belly. Beneath his lips, a limb moved to greet him so he did it again, following the little pokes and prods as their son declared he too was up for the day.

 

‘I’m really glad I called you that night from the motel,’ Adalind said suddenly.

 

He glanced up at her, hands replacing his lips on her stomach and rubbing soft circles over each new bump and movement. ‘I’m really glad I realised it was you that morning,’ he admitted. ‘If we hadn’t talked, if we hadn’t had sex again to undo that spell, you wouldn’t have known you _could_ call me.’

 

‘Do you think we’d be here if you hadn’t?’ Adalind asked, pushing herself back against the headboard and stealing Nick’s pillow to put behind her back. He helped her get comfortable while he really thought about what she was asking.

 

‘I do,’ he finally decided. ‘I think it would have taken us longer and I think I’d have missed out on so much more of this.’ He bent down and kissed her belly again. ‘But, yeah, I think we’d have ended up here.’

 

‘I don’t want a big wedding,’ Adalind murmured. ‘Just us and our friends.’

 

‘We can do that.’

 

‘Can we do it before our baby is born?’

 

Nick’s hand stilled and he looked up at her in surprise. ‘You don’t want to wait? That doesn’t give us much time to organise anything.’

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘We don’t even need a wedding really, just, maybe just the registry office?’

 

Nick eyed her long and hard, looking to see if there was something in her expression that would tell him if this was really what she wanted or if she was only saying so because she thought _he_ didn’t want some big elaborate ceremony with dozens of guests and people he barely knew. He didn’t see anything that suggested she really wanted something more, though, so this time when he leant forward the kiss was for her and not their son.

 

‘Yeah, we can do that.’ He placed one finally kiss on her belly before he slipped out of bed. She held her hands out to him and he tugged her gently out after him. ‘You’re back at work today, right?’

 

She nodded. ‘Just two more days and then I’m going to be working from home.’

 

‘How are you going to deal with your study sessions for the rest of the semester?’

 

‘Facetime is my friend,’ she announced. ‘I’m going to set up video chat sessions with the students who need help. Most of them will just have to start emailing me instead of dropping by for a visit.’

 

Nick nodded. Adalind’s boss, the entire department really, had been pretty understanding about her need to take time off. They were going to extreme lengths to prove just how much they valued having Adalind working with them. He was sure that said more about her than it did the guy who’d previously held her position but he knew from conversations he’d had with her co-workers and her boss when he stopped by that the previous guy had been terrible at his job and had left them in the lurch when he’d left unexpectedly.

 

They’d told Adalind to take as much time as she needed, probably knowing that she would never abuse their generosity. They’d talked it over but in the end Adalind had decided she would take the four weeks leading up to the birth and work from home, take the month after off entirely and then depending on how she felt, start working from home again a few hours a week. Nick had tried to convince her to take more time off but she hadn’t liked the idea of sitting at home in the loft all day.

 

He had hopes that if they went ahead with the renovations (and he already knew they would if Henrietta’s people passed his inspection) that Adalind would get wrapped up in making their loft a real “fome” and not rush herself back into working.

 

He hadn’t quite figured out yet how he was supposed to broach the topic of leave with Renard, he’d simply put in a request for some vacation time knowing he had a stack of it owing and hoped that would work out well enough. He had no doubt once his two weeks were up he’d want more time home with Adalind and their son but he would just have to make every effort, on the days work allowed him, to be home in the evenings for them both.

 

Although, when Renard eventually found out he’d knocked Adalind up, been living with her and, let’s be honest, probably married her by the time Nick felt like telling him, he might find it a little hard to be at the station with the power of Renard’s stare burning holes in the back of his head.

 

Just thinking about the look of shock on Renard’s face made him smile and Adalind frowned up at him. ‘What?’

 

Rather than explain what he’d been smiling about he asked, ‘Want to go ring shopping after work?’

 

For some reason, his request surprised her. ‘What?’

 

‘You need an engagement ring,’ he pointed out. ‘And we both need wedding rings.’

 

‘You’re going to wear a ring?’

 

‘Yeah, I am.’

 

‘I’m going to change my name.’

 

He may have teased her with the idea of a name change when he was asking (begging) her to marry him but he never would have pushed for it. That didn’t mean her confirming she wanted to take his name didn’t send a thrill up his spine. ‘Are you sure?’

 

Adalind nodded, like it really didn’t require much thought. ‘There aren’t many good things associated with Schade. I like the idea of starting our life together with a name that means more than a thirst for power.’

 

Nick frowned. ‘You know we don’t think that about you, right? You could make your name mean something better, something good.’

 

‘I know,’ Adalind assured him. ‘I just think it’s time to let go. It’s the only thing I really have left tying me to my mother but that’s not a good thing.’

 

Nick felt like this was the moment he should interject, the moment he should reassure her that her mother had loved her but he couldn’t because he didn’t know if Catherine Schade had ever loved her daughter but he did know that at the time she died she’d thrown her only daughter out like she was a piece of garbage and that in the moment Adalind had needed her the most Catherine had spurned her and ridiculed her for being so foolish as to fall victim to his Grimm schemes.

 

Suddenly, Adalind snorted a laugh. ‘My mother must be turning in her grave, her only child marrying a Grimm.’

 

Nick grinned; the idea had its appeal. He was just glad that, in spite of all they’d put each other through, and all of the things his own mother knew about Adalind, she seemed to have come to terms with his loving Adalind. As far as he could tell she’d embraced it.

 

With that thought in mind, he sent his mother a quick update over breakfast, letting her know he was planning to marry Adalind before the baby was born in a little over four weeks’ time.

 

Before he left for work and his meeting with Henrietta, Adalind handed him a new remote control for the fancy garage doors. It didn’t look anything like a garage door opener, rather it looked like a black fob key for a car. ‘It can be keyed to open the elevator, too,’ she explained. ‘And probably the Grimm room when that’s all set up.’

 

Nick frowned at her use of “Grimm room”, they were going to have to come up with a better name for it. There was just no way they were going to be throwing those two words around when they finally got the place set up.

 

At his meeting with Henrietta and the contractor she knew, the hexenbiest agreed with him it was a terrible name. ‘I’m sure Adalind will come up with something better.’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick laughed. ‘She came up with “fome”.’

 

Henrietta laughed at that but pointed out how accurate it was for their loft. A descriptor that would be even more accurate once the work was done. And it would be done. The people Henrietta introduced him to were loyal to the project manager Kurt Trent and to her. They knew Henrietta dosed them with something to make them forget their days and seemed to think the pay was worth losing hours here and there and the strange blank spots in their memory that reinserted themselves whenever they were at work or dealing with work-related issues.

 

Nick had no idea how it worked exactly but he was assured by Henrietta that it did and though he might have once hesitated to trust her, the fact that Adalind so easily put her faith in Henrietta had him agreeing to let the work go ahead.

 

He just needed to sort out the money side of things. They had enough money set aside that they could get started on ordering the materials they’d need, but the sooner they could sell off the Grimm treasure the better.

 

‘How much do you think you’ll get for it?’ Wu asked. He sounded genuinely interested and Nick felt a twinge of guilt that maybe some of that money should go to his friends for helping him locate the treasure. And generally, just putting up with all the wesen madness he’d brought into their lives.

 

Wu waved it off, clearly having read something of his thoughts in Nick’s expression. The two of them were alone in the elevator, having arrived at work at the same time. ‘It belongs to your ancestors,’ Wu dismissed. ‘It should be yours. Besides,’ he added when the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, ‘it sounds like most of your share will be going toward the loft and you can bet I’m going to be there a lot looking at those books of yours.’

 

Nick laughed and they made their way inside to his desk where Hank was just rising out of his chair, cell phone in hand. ‘Hey,’ Nick greeted.

 

‘Hey,’ Hank greeted them both in return. ‘We’ve got a case. Double homicide, possible home invasion.’

 

‘Just how I wanted to start my day,’ Nick quipped, turning right back around and leading the way back to the elevators. As they traced back the steps he and Wu had only taken moments ago, Nick filled Hank and Wu in on his plan to draw out a Black Claw operative by staging an auction.

 

‘It could work,’ Hank agreed. ‘Do you even know what we should be looking for, though?’

 

‘No clue,’ Nick was quick to reply. ‘I don’t have any idea how we would tell Black Claw apart from any other interested parties but it’s worth a shot, right?’

 

Of course, putting on an auction required the cooperation of the wesen fence they wanted to take the treasure in the first place. Either Trubel had gotten violent or something had happened to make her threaten him, because when Trubel called later that day it was to inform Nick she and Monroe had gotten an extremely good deal on some of the smaller, less gaudy, pieces and that the fence himself had put forth the suggestion of an auction.

 

‘He said it’ll take him about a week to spread word of it,’ Trubel explained.

 

‘A week?’ Nick checked. ‘That’s not very long.’

 

He could practically hear Trubel’s shrug through the phone. ‘He said he wouldn’t need long to get people interested and that the sooner the better. I got the feeling he’s thinking of leaving Portland soon but he liked the idea of one last big job.’

 

Nick didn’t ask what gave her that impression, he was just happy that soon they’d be free of the treasure. He didn’t like having it locked away beneath his home. Knowing no one could find it didn’t ease the niggling fear that someone would steal it.

 

‘The sooner we get rid of this stuff the better.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Trubel agreed. ‘I think I’m going to have to go on a mission for HW soon, Chavez has been hinting at something.’

 

‘Anything I need to know about?’

 

‘I don’t even know about it,’ Trubel told him. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Meisner, see if he’s more willing to talk.’

 

‘No luck?’

 

‘I don’t know, I’m hoping he’ll be more willing to meet while I’m away on this mission.’

 

‘I don’t like this.’

 

‘I know,’ Trubel acknowledged. ‘Nick, I have to do this.’

 

‘I know, I just don’t trust these people.’ His phone started beeping, letting him know he had another call. ‘I have to go; will I see you before you go?’

 

‘I’ll be around.’

 

Nick hung up with Trubel and answered the other call. ‘Burkhardt.’

 

‘Nick.’ Rosalee sounded concerned. ‘The Council finally called me back, they found a mole within the Council.’

 

Given what little information they’d been able to pass on to the Wesen Council, Nick was surprised they’d weeded out a mole. Of course, there was always the chance there was more than one and Rosalee hadn’t specified whether the mole was Black Claw or HW.

 

‘Black Claw,’ Rosalee answered when he asked. ‘They didn’t get much out of him when they questioned him. I’m sure they killed him, but they couldn’t tell me anything useful. Nick, they called to warn me.’

 

Nick scoffed at that. What was the point in calling them to warn them of a new threat when Rosalee had been the one to call them and alert them to the problem in the first place?

 

‘At least they’re taking things seriously now.’

 

‘I think we can expect more regular calls from now on,’ Rosalee told him. ‘We gave them this warning and I think they want to keep us on their side.’

 

Nick wasn’t sure how much power the Wesen Council really had anymore but he appreciated that any help they offered would be useful at some point. He wondered if one of those calls in the future would be to alert them that another mole had been found and this new one belonging to HW. He honestly wouldn’t be surprised, might even be a little smug.

 

As soon as he was off the phone with Rosalee Hank waved him over and Nick carefully picked his way across the bedroom toward the second set of home-invasion homicides for the day. Neither of the men in the bed had even had time to react before they were shot dead. Much like the previous couple, they’d been asleep in bed when their killer or killers broke in through the backdoor, snuck into their rooms and shot them, likely with a silencer to dull the sound. Judging by the rough timeline the ME had been able to give them, Eric and Josef Manahan had died here first before their killer (or killers) had moved on to Kate and John Bauer.

 

The second set of victims had been found first when their teenage son had come home from a night at a friend’s house and found them still in their beds, sheets soaked with blood. He and Hank had been in the middle of taking the son’s statement when the call had come in that a second set of victims had been found. Wu was still at the first crime scene, finishing off interviews and taking statements. So far, they hadn’t found any connection between the two couples but Nick knew it was only a matter of time.

 

There was nothing to suggest either murder was wesen related and that gave Nick hope that this wouldn’t turn out to be a hard solve. Not that he expected it to be easy, it was just that anything seemed easier than dealing with Dobrini’s nonsensical death. He and Hank could do with a straight forward homicide, it would certainly go a long way to easing the tension that still existed between them.

 

Hank was trying, Nick could see that, but every time Adalind’s name came up or they went passed a baby or something else that reminded Hank of the baby Adalind was carrying, Hank’s face became tight and his words to Nick were short and sharp. What was worse, Hank was aware he was doing it and trying hard not to and that was making his unease obvious. Still, Nick was finding that sticking with his plan to act like Hank was fine with Adalind was the best way to go, it overlooked Hank’s obvious discomfort but didn’t draw attention to it.

 

He didn’t expect his partner would ever be able to joke about Nick’s relationship like Wu did but he had hope that once the baby arrived, Hank would see how serious Nick was about keeping the two of them in his life.

 

Of course, seeing the ring on Nick’s finger should also indicate the seriousness of his decision but the number of ex-wives Hank had suggested that he could no longer view marriage with the same reverence as Nick. Even though Hank knew Nick didn’t see marriage as something that could ever end, the fact that he was planning to marry Adalind probably suggested to his partner he’d lost his mind more than it did conveying his seriousness.

 

He hadn’t told anyone about asking Adalind to marry him yet, he hadn’t found the right time to bring it up. He didn’t know if he needed to make a thing of it or if he could just wait for their friends to figure it out when they saw the ring on her finger. He knew he should tell them sooner rather than later and he knew that Monroe, Rosalee and Wu would be happy for him, but there was still that part of him that wanted to keep it between them for a little longer.

 

What it came down to was that he wanted his mother to know first. He hoped she’d gotten the email he’d sent that morning, he could only assume she had, because he _would_ be taking Adalind ring shopping after work and he would never ask her to hide her ring and she certainly deserved to have one to show off when they finally told people.


	30. Chapter 28

 

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 28**

When they’d given Henrietta the go ahead to tell her project manager they wanted their loft and warehouse converted to full on fome, Nick had expected the work would take a couple of weeks to get started. He’d assumed there would be materials to order, measurements to be made, the kind of thing that went into building a house that took time and good management.

 

He’d underestimated Henrietta and possibly her team.

 

Adalind was at the kitchen table, mug of tea in hand, laptop open on the table in front of her and a pen and paper beside it, ready to take notes. As Nick walked behind her to enter the kitchen he saw she was already engaged in a video call with one of the needier of the students she’d been tasked with looking after. Below them, something went crunch and they both flinched. The girl Adalind was talking to paused to ask about the noise but Adalind waved her off.

 

Crunching, banging, the occasional string of profanity, they’d been living with that all day long for a week now. Every morning at 7:30am, bang on the dot, Adalind received a text message from the project manager to let her know the crew was downstairs and needed to be let in. They’d both been taken by surprise the first day but by now they just went with it. Their new home was slowly starting to take shape from the ashes of the old loft and warehouse so at least there was an obvious result from all the noise.

 

His concern about drawing notice with all the equipment and materials they’d be driving in had been set at ease when the project manager had shown him the logos freshly painted on the work vans that showed they belonged to the Portland Council. Apparently, they were masking themselves as a clean-up crew making the area safer for future businesses. Nobody questioned it, there wasn’t really anyone around to question it and so Nick let it go, but only after he’d learned that the number they advertised went to a message service Henrietta had set up and that there was, at all times, an unassuming looking man stationed out front with the vehicles and gear who was stronger, faster and deadlier than he looked.

 

Travel mug filled with coffee, Nick scooped his keys off the counter and approached Adalind. He spared a brief look for the girl she was talking to before he dropped a kiss on her head in a silent goodbye, not wanting to interrupt her work. She glanced up at him, flashing him a brilliant smile and caught his hand in hers, giving it a gentle squeeze around his keys. The ring on her finger had him smirking down at her before he turned to the go.

 

It hadn’t taken them long to find the perfect ring, Nick suspected (rightfully) that Adalind had always had in mind the kind of ring she wanted and so it had been a matter of a little workplace googling (Adalind), a little shuffling of funds (Nick) and a trip to a jewellery store to pick it up. The man behind the counter had nodded in approval when Adalind made her selection and the approval had made Adalind giddy which left Nick wearing a bemused expression that might possibly have been goofy adoration but that had won him the approval of the older woman picking up a bracelet she’d been having cleaned so it had all been a bit of a win.

 

Adalind’s chosen engagement ring was part of a wedding set that Rosalee had gushed over before the implication of an engagement ring had her grinning knowingly at Nick. Monroe had just clapped him on the back with a grin of his own, neither surprised by the news their friends were getting married and neither commented when Adalind told them she’d booked a time for a quick legal ceremony and nothing more.

 

Rosalee still planned to take Adalind shopping for a nice dress to wear but the simple, unquestioning approval from the fuchsbau had meant more to Adalind (and to Nick) than any offer of shopping could. Wu had similarly been unsurprised by the news, Josh didn’t know their history well enough to be surprised and Trubel had only offered a nod like she’d been expecting it to happen, though probably sooner.

 

Hank was another story entirely. His partner hadn’t known how to react when he’d walked into the Spice Shop in the aftermath of Rosalee’s cooing over the ring. He’d offered a perfunctory “congratulations” that had sounded a lot more sincere than Nick had been expecting and hadn’t mentioned it since. Though, Nick had to admit, the frosty awkward silences seemed to have lessened since then and Hank’s reactions to Wu’s teasing had been less wanting to vomit up breakfast and more reluctant amusement.

 

He was counting it a win.

 

He didn’t take the elevator down to the garage, they weren’t able to use that at the moment, instead, Nick went to the archway that had been cut into the wall opposite the kitchen, swept aside the sheet that was giving them some semblance of privacy and started down the ladder that had been placed there for him. Once the work was completed shifting around and placing in new support beams and additional weight-baring pillars, the archway would lead into the expanded loft area over the warehouse. For now, though, it was just an easier way for Nick to get out of the loft and down to the garage while they refitted the elevator with the new doors for the downstairs apartment.

 

It was amazing just how much they’d already gotten done, though he supposed it helped when half the workforce were supernaturally strong wesen who could cart around the heavy steel beams without machinery. He’d been told it’d be another day before the changes to the basic structure of the warehouse were completed and then another two days on top of that to put in the extension and the new walls. The rest of the time they’d given him for the build was going to be taken up by things like electricity, plumbing, flooring and painting.

 

Mostly, by this point, Nick just nodded along, he’d wait for Adalind to shove samples of paint, floors and possibly carpet under his nose before he got too invested in the home side of things. He cared about the security side of things at the moment, and every time he watched a bit of reinforced wall go in he felt a little better about raising their family in the little loft that was supposed to be a temporary solution.

 

‘How goes the fome?’ Hank asked, drawing Nick up short when he arrived at his desk. It was the first time Hank had actively asked about the renovations because they were directly related to his relationship with Adalind.

 

‘I’m still having to climb up and down a ladder but things are looking good.’ Nick eyed Hank for a moment, trying to figure out where the sudden interest had come from.

 

Hank, seeing the look, sighed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms, perhaps a little defensively, over his chest. ‘I keep waiting for her to say something or do something so that I can be right and she’ll just revert back to how she was but it hasn’t happened yet.’

 

Nick nodded, tugging his chair out from his desk and dropping into it before sliding closer to Hank. ‘I get that,’ he assured Hank. ‘But I’ve been living with her for months, Hank, eight months of being friends and more, if she were going to be that woman again, I’d like to think I’d have seen some sign of it before now.’

 

Hank nodded, acknowledging the point Nick was making. ‘I know, I need to trust that-’ his partner broke off, a strange look coming over him. ‘Wait, did you say eight months?’

 

The look, Nick realised, had been some math going on. So far, Hank had been happily denying Nick’s claims that the baby Adalind carried was his. Nick couldn’t say that didn’t fit with the Adalind Hank knew so he’d understood, to a certain extent why his partner had been unable to believe Nick hadn’t just been suckered in. Though, how exactly Hank worked that out, Nick had never understood. Did Hank think he’d just taken the kid as is own when he’d started this relationship with Adalind? He supposed, given his willingness to bring Diana in as part of his family that it wasn’t entirely out of the question.

 

‘Adalind’s eight months pregnant,’ Hank said calmly, sounding a little far away as though he were still firmly inside his own thoughts.

 

‘Thirty-seven weeks if you want to be specific,’ Nick replied.

 

‘This thing you’ve got going on with Adalind started eight months ago.’

 

‘If you want to be even more specific,’ Nick went on, ‘you could say it happened on the day of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding.’

 

There was a moment where Nick didn’t think Hank would be able to say anything in response. A cloud rolled over his expression and what Nick could only assume was anger darkened his partner’s features. It didn’t last long, though, before it was gone and in its place was reluctant curiosity and that more than anything told Nick that Hank was finally free of the poison HW had been pumping into him because Hank hadn’t looked properly curious about anything for a long time.

 

‘You slept with Adalind on the day of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding?’ Hank didn’t sound like he believed the words coming out of his own mouth and it should have been weird but, though he wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, at some point in his mind he’d stopped seeing the overlap of his relationship with Adalind and his one with Juliette.

 

Not because there wasn’t a lot of grey area there where emotions got involved long before anything physical occurred (at least again) but because as horrible as it would sound to Juliette and probably to Hank, of the two relationships, his one with Adalind was a hell of a lot more important. He’d started looking at it as how and when his relationship with Adalind started and not so much about the how and when his relationship with Juliette ended.

 

This new way of reconciling his romantic entanglement likely contributed to the reason Nick said, ‘Twice,’ without really thinking about it.

 

‘You had sex with Adalind on Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding day – twice?!’ Hank hissed, mindful of the other officers around them who might overhear, although Nick wasn’t sure what difference that made anymore. Every one that mattered knew about his upcoming nuptials, Black Claw and HW surely knew something was going on so he really needed to suck it up and tell Renard – more than just the truth about Adalind.

 

‘Yes.’

 

Hank mulled this over for a few moments before he asked in a perfectly reasonable voice, ‘Why?’

 

At this point, Nick could have explained all about the spell and the mistake but much like the overlap of his relationships, Nick had started viewing this moment differently. In his mind, both times were with Adalind like they really had been. He couldn’t see Juliette in the moment anymore, even when Adalind had been disguised as her because he knew Adalind so well, could see her own moves and reactions in that first time that his mind had taken to filling in the visual details that had been missing.

 

He’d made the mistake of telling Adalind that once and she’d been beyond smug. She liked the idea that he couldn’t imagine sex with anyone else anymore. What he had with Adalind was so much more powerful that everything from his past, even all those times with the real Juliette, sort of paled in comparison. If he really thought about it, it was the difference between comfortably pleasant which was how he thought of all those times with Juliette in his head now and the seesawing passion, the slow and languid and general chaotic (more than) occasionally, rough sex he had with Adalind. Well, as rough as it could get with her being so pregnant and all. Sometimes Nick looked forward to getting back those wild, reckless encounters.

 

Sex with Juliette hadn’t been boring but it couldn’t compare with what he and Adalind did even on the days where they were tired and it was slow and gentle.

 

That was a weird thing to realise and it reflected in his response to Hank when he simply said, ‘It’s Adalind.’

 

‘It’s Adalind,’ Hank repeated. ‘That’s not really an answer.’

 

‘No,’ Monroe disagreed, later that day when they swung by the Spice Shop to check in with their friends and the conversation came up. Really, Hank brought it up because he seemed to have reached the point where he wanted an explanation and was willing to accept one. ‘It really is an answer.’

 

‘How?’ Hank asked. ‘That doesn’t really tell me anything.’

 

Rosalee smiled gently. ‘You really need to think back on everything that you were ignoring for those months,’ she explained. ‘Watch how they are together, you’ll see it.’

 

Nick didn’t know what exactly it was his friends saw between him and Adalind but it was enough that Rosalee and Monroe had been completely unsurprised when he told them she was pregnant, that they were together and in love. He could only assume, now that Hank was willing to see it, that it would be just as obvious to his partner as it was to the blutbad and fuchsbau who knew him best.

 

‘Any news on the auction?’ Nick asked, changing the subject.

 

Monroe nodded. ‘Trubel and I met with the fence again, this morning. He has the location sorted – Trubel’s been checking it out all day – and he’s already got quite a few interested buyers. He wants to dangle the treasure over them for another couple of days to really build interest but we’re set for Saturday night.’

 

Nick frowned. ‘That’s not really how I planned to spend the weekend after my wedding.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ll deal. It’ll be nice to have all that stuff moved out of the tunnels and the loft. There are too many people walking around my house at the moment.’

 

‘How’s that coming?’ Rosalee asked. ‘Is Adalind going crazy being stuck there with all that noise?’

 

‘We should have the elevator back tomorrow so at least she’ll be able to leave again but I think she’s okay. She’s mostly just been working and she’s constantly shopping online for new furniture and things. We got a lot of stuff from that surprise baby shower and Adalind’s really looking forward to setting up the nursery, even if it won’t be ready for when the baby is born.’

 

‘That was really thoughtful of her boss,’ Rosalee said. ‘I don’t think she should worry about not having the nursery just yet, he’ll be in with you for a few months.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s how we’re looking at it. Adalind says this will give her time to decorate according to his personality,’ this Nick said with a bemused grin.

 

They were interrupted then by a frantic wesen looking for a cure for something that sounded vaguely itchy and definitely unpleasant so Nick and Hank took their leave, returning to work and, as it turned out, a fresh robbery.

 

Wu was on scene when they arrived looking annoyed. He stood in front of a pawn shop, the windows smashed in and glass littering the sidewalk. ‘Security cameras caught the whole thing,’ he informed them. ‘Three teenagers, smashed the glass while the owner was closed for lunch. Wiped him clean of his collection of hunting knives and the revolver he keeps beneath the counter. The owner,’ Wu went on, ‘identified our thieves as his nephew and two friends.’ Wu held out a piece of paper. ‘Names and addresses.’

 

Nick took the paper with a frown. ‘I don’t trust it when things are this easy.’

 

Wu smirked. ‘You’ll want this one too,’ he said, holding out a second piece of paper. ‘Names and addresses of the two girls who then stole the knives and the gun from our thieves.’

 

‘What?’ Hank asked.

 

‘Oh, you heard me.’ Wu shook his head. ‘Our three thieves went to the skate park down the street to meet up with their girlfriends and show off their prizes. One girlfriend didn’t show but the other two did and they were apparently so impressed with what the boys took they stole them and took off while the boys were busy showing off their moves.’

 

Nick snorted. ‘Really?’

 

Wu nodded his head, still looking annoyed but now there was amusement playing across his features as well. ‘Oh, it gets better. The kid who saw the whole thing go down and called the cops also saw the three boys get stuffed into a van right after it happened.’

 

‘Now you’re just messing with us,’ Hank said, incredulously.

 

‘Nope.’ Wu held up a third piece of paper. ‘This one has the plate for the van on it.’

 

‘Divide and conquer?’ Nick suggested, beginning to feel a little of Wu’s amusement, inappropriate as it might be. This whole thing was just a little ridiculous. Still, the abduction of three teenage boys was nothing to laugh about even if Nick suspected the reason they’d been abducted was because they’d robbed and vandalised the pawn shop.

 

‘I’ll track down our van if you want to start interviewing the families.’

 

Nick nodded. He and Hank stuck around a little longer to talk to the owner and get a few more details before they started toward the first of the boys’ families – the brother and sister-in-law of the pawn shop owner.

 

Only the sister-in-law was home when they arrived and she went from being supremely angry at her son for being so stupid to concerned in the span of a heartbeat once Hank had explained the situation as they knew it. She didn’t seem terribly surprised to learn her son had broken her brother-in-law’s windows or stolen from him, just angry that he’d done it even though he’d promised to stop stealing and acting out. She did seem a little surprised that someone had tossed all three boys in a van but that was tinged with guilt for thinking that they probably deserved it.

 

Nick asked a couple of questions about his previous behaviour as there hadn’t been any priors on her son’s record and no hint that the freshly turned eighteen-year-old had any juvenile offences but it was all petty things, done to family and friends that hadn’t been reported. Lots of stealing little objects and giving them back when he got caught. The occasional fight with someone at school and one or two cases of bullying but nothing that had crossed the line into criminal act until the afternoon’s robbery.

 

They got the same story from the parents of the other two boys and the two girls but got something a little more useful from the third girlfriend, the one who hadn’t turned up at the skate park.

 

Bethany Manne was nothing like the boys or the other two girls she like to hang out with. That was the impression Nick got from two minutes of conversation with her and her mother. What he had at first taken to be an act put on for her soft spoken, sweet natured mother, proved to be genuine the more they talked. What sweet Bethany was doing hanging around the others only became clear when he learned they’d grown up together and had simply always been friends. The others might have taken a violent and rebellious path but Bethany seemed to keep them grounded.

 

As far as Nick could tell, Bethany was the only reason the others hadn’t stepped over the line to crime and assault before now. Which raised the question of what was different this time? Bethany had an answer for that, too, though.

 

‘It’s this new drug,’ she told them after she’d gone up to her room and come back with a small plastic bag filled with shiny dark blue powder. ‘You snort it like coke and it’s supposed to make you feel really strong and hyper focused – but it just made them angry and like they wanted to do stupid things.’

 

Nick took the bag from her outstretched hand and examined it through the plastic. It didn’t look like any drug he’d come across before but he’d check with narcotics and see if there was anything new on their radar. It could turn out to be died flour for all he knew, offering the kids a placebo effect because they wanted so much to believe.

 

They thanked Bethany and her mother for their time and while Hank drove back to the station, Nick gave a detective from narcotics he knew a quick call. She hadn’t heard of anything like what Nick was describing and so that left Nick wondering if it really was some fake placebo being sold around the kids’ school – or if it wasn’t something much worse and wesen related. There hadn’t been any other signs of wesen in this case but given how closely entwined wesen were in his daily life, Nick wouldn’t rule it out.

 

They were still ten minutes away from the station when Hank surprised Nick with a question. ‘Tell me how you and Adalind ended up friends. When did you first even do something that wasn’t trying to kill each other?’

 

Nick studied Hank for a moment, assessing whether or not his partner’s interest was genuine or if he was gearing up for some sort of dismissal. It seemed to be an honest question and so Nick gave it some thought.

 

‘We went to dinner to celebrate her new job,’ he answered eventually.

 

Hank frowned. ‘See, I don’t get how that even happened. Did you just decide that you were sorry you stole her daughter and started talking to her? Did she approach you?’

 

‘This was after we had sex,’ Nick clarified. ‘After she called me for help when she got attacked in her motel room.’

 

‘So, her calling for help really changed things?’

 

‘No,’ Nick answered slowly. ‘The sex is what changed things. Well, the fight we had between rounds is what changed things – we actually talked.’

 

‘This was after you went out to celebrate her new job, though.’

 

‘No,’ Nick corrected, ‘the sex came before that.’

 

‘What?’

 

Nick sighed. ‘Do you really want to know this or are you just asking because you think you should? Because I have to tell you, this really isn’t any of your business and I don’t want to have to explain myself.’

 

‘I really want to know,’ Hank assured him. ‘I watched you with Juliette for years – you were still with Juliette when you slept with Adalind, when you started this whole crazy thing with her. I thought I knew you but the Nick I thought I knew would never have cheated on Juliette.’

 

Nick debated telling him the whole truth, the truth about the spell and the lying but in the end, that didn’t matter so much as what came after. The first time he and Adalind had sex might have been the trigger but all the feelings and actions that led to that moment were definitely present before the spell. There was just no way either of them could have enjoyed it nearly so much if they hadn’t been so involved in the moment. He seriously doubted Hank wanted to know that Nick had known it wasn’t Juliette he was sleeping with the first time even if he hadn’t been able to make sense of that knowledge in the moment.

 

‘Adalind came over while Juliette was out to try and get me to help her find Diana. We had a huge fight, things got thrown, words were said and one thing kind of led to another.’

 

Hank gave him a disgusted look. ‘How does that even happen? I mean, really? How does that happen?’

 

Nick smiled sheepishly at this. ‘We’ve always been attracted to each other, I guess we’d run out of other ways to hurt each other – angry violent sex seemed like the best way to go.’

 

‘Angry? Violent?’ Hank raised his brows.

 

‘We had hate sex. She’s a hexenbiest and I’m a Grimm, things got broken.’

 

‘I did not want to know that.’

 

‘You asked.’

 

‘I’m regretting that.’

 

‘After that, I promised I’d let her know whenever my mom checked in and we went our separate ways.’

 

‘Until she called you for help,’ Hank guessed.

 

‘Yeah and somehow that resulted in me recommending her for a job because I was the only one who knew she was still in town and then Juliette was out having a girls’ night and Adalind just wanted to do something to celebrate and then her motel room was compromised and I moved her into the loft to keep her safe.’

 

Hank didn’t speak for a while after that, he was deep in thought as he pulled into the parking garage and navigated to his parking space. Nick left him to his thoughts. There wasn’t much more he could say to explain what happened and how it had started because those moments in the beginning when they were learning not to hate each other were really a reaction to the years before that. They’d hated each other for so long but they’d also met each other move for move.

 

Sometimes, Nick got a kick out of imagining how differently his life would have gone if he and Adalind had been friends from the start, if he’d sought her out that moment in front of the jewellery store when she woged in front of him or if he’d reacted differently during the case when he was supposed to be protecting her.

 

‘I’m not just rethinking every action I missed while I was under HW’s control,’ Hank said eventually, cutting the engine and pulling the keys from the ignition. ‘I’m thinking about all of the times you two fought before then and it’s not a comfortable realisation I’m having here.’

 

Nick could only imagine what Hank was seeing now as he thought back over all of the heated exchanges he’d witnessed between them. Just thinking about the ones he hadn’t witnessed had Nick wincing. There had definitely been tension between them but back then it had always been hate and a reluctant physical attraction that Adalind had recognised and liked to toy with when she knew he was feeling the charge too.

 

That time she’d been locked up in a cell was just one of the times she’d tried that on him and not even the one likely to work out in her favour. That time he’d been mad enough at her that it had been easy to overlook the physical draw she had on him. There were other times, smaller interactions where her words and saucy looks had worked better.

 

Hank didn’t need to know that. Ever.

 

Back at their desks, Wu had an update for them on the van but it wasn’t anything useful. The van had been reported stolen two days ago, the plates swapped out twice and it had disappeared into a section of the city where traffic cameras were mysteriously malfunctioning. Which turned out fine because ten minutes after dropping the mystery drug powder off at the lab, the two girlfriends were marched into the station by their parents and a little more of the story came out.

 

The girls had the knives and guns still on them and Wu slipped them into evidence bags while Hank and Nick took the girls’ statements. They didn’t have much more to add to the statement taken from the kid at the skate park but what that kid hadn’t known was that the girls weren’t too far away when their boyfriends were taken and they’d managed to get a good look at the people in the van.

 

The people in the van who were wearing animal masks.

 

Nick’s phone dinged with a message just as they were escorting the girls and their parents out (the pawn shop owner didn’t see the need to press charges against the girls). It was an excited message from Adalind saying the elevator was back in action and she was taking the opportunity to go pick out some paint samples.

 

He sent back a quick reply sharing her excitement about finally being able to get out of the loft and returned to his desk in the hopes that this new information about the wesen involved would somehow clear things up.

 

It didn’t, and he was just contemplating calling it a day when he received another message from Adalind asking him if he thought it was too cliché to go blue for the nursery or if they should choose something a little more neutral. Nick didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to that. Did he care what colour they painted the new nursery? Did he care if they went traditional blue or changed it up a bit with – what were they going for these days? Green?

 

He sent a message back saying he didn’t mind blue but he also thought green was a good colour. He’d probably come to regret that but Adalind sent him a thoughtful emoji so he figured he hadn’t completely misread her question. It had been a legitimate question and not her feeling out his thoughts on a decision she’d already made. He’d gotten pretty good at telling the difference since the further into her pregnancy she got the more she liked to throw questions at him that weren’t questions at all.

 

He went back to work, searching through the messages and emails on the boys’ phones, looking through their social media accounts in the hopes that something in there would link them in some tangible way to wesen. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, especially given the boys and their families weren’t wesen but Wu was still trying to trace the van and although the boys were troublemakers they hadn’t gotten themselves in so deep as to drive someone to kidnap them.

 

They’d ruled out any connection between the uncle with the pawn shop and the van filled with wesen so the logical leap was that the boys themselves were the connection, Nick just didn’t know what. Though, he suspected it had something to do with the shiny blue powder Hank was retrieving from the lab.

 

Nick was looking through the arrest record for the dealer Bethany had given them, when Hank came back. Nick looked up at him expectantly. Hank sank into his chair and place the little plastic baggy on the desk between them. Half of its contents was missing.

 

‘Figured with this new wesen connection we should have Rosalee test it.’

 

Nick nodded, poking the bag with the end of a pen before he scooped it up and put it in his pocket. ‘I have nothing,’ Nick offered. ‘I can’t find any obvious wesen connection, I can’t even find anyone threatening to kidnap or hurt these kids – nothing serious anyway, nothing that would suggest kidnapping.’

 

‘I found the van!’ Wu announced, shoving an iPad under Nick’s nose before whipping it back so he could show it to both of them. On screen, the black van still with the set of plates given by their witness, disappeared into a parking garage and then never left.

 

‘You think they switched vehicles?’ Hank asked.

 

Wu nodded. ‘I’ve sent a couple of uniforms over to see if they can locate the van.’

 

‘Good,’ Nick murmured. ‘Maybe we’ll find our connection in there.’

 

Hank and Wu nodded but then both of them frowned, gazes directed at something over Nick’s shoulder.

 

‘Uh, Nick,’ Wu warned.

 

Nick spun around to see what had put that warning tone in Wu’s voice and was surprised to see Adalind making a beeline for him. He opened his mouth to greet her, smile tugging at his lips despite his confusion (and concern) that she had come to see him at work – where Renard and everyone else could see her – but the smile slipped when he realised there was a bruise forming on her jaw and her grey sweater was splattered with blood.

 

He was on his feet in an instant, eyes searching her for any sign of injuries that might explain the blood. He didn’t find and he knew then that the blood covering her sweater belonged to someone else. That matched the look of absolute fury on her face, too.

 

What the hell had happened in the hour since he’d last spoken to her?

 

He took the handful of steps necessary to meet her and his hand immediately went to her jaw, gently lifting her chin to inspect the large bruise. ‘What happened?’ He didn’t bother asking if she was okay, he had every faith that whoever had given her the bruise was far from okay.

 

‘There are Royals in town,’ she told him shortly. ‘We need to talk to Sean.’

 

‘Alright.’ He dropped one hand down to stroke her belly. ‘Do we need to bury a body?’

 

She shook her head; his words had drawn a reluctant smile from her. ‘They’ll take care of their own.’

 

She gave the hand on her jaw a squeeze and then stepped around him leading the way to Renard’s office. She nodded a greeting to Hank and Wu as she passed, both of whom gave Nick questioning looks as he trailed after her. He merely shrugged, managing to convey with the action that he’d fill them in later.

 

Suiting actions to her mood, Adalind threw the door to Renard’s office open and marched (waddled) on in like she owned the place. ‘We need to talk,’ she announced.

 

Startled, Renard looked up from his desk and the look on his face was exactly as amusing as Nick imagined it would be.


	31. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adalind and Nick have a much needed chat with Renard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the wonderful comments and the kudos!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 29**

 

Trailing behind Adalind like the indulgent fiancé he was, Nick got a nice look at Renard’s expression when Adalind burst through the door unannounced. There was the briefest flicker of alarm which he smothered quickly enough behind annoyance. It was a strange expression, one filled with contempt, exasperation and a healthy dose of concern. When your ex (who you have a child with) bursts unannounced into your office like hell is on her heels there should be a healthy dose of concern.

 

‘Adalind.’ Renard sounded resigned and Nick took the moment to quickly shut the door. Mostly, he did it to give them some privacy, he did it _quickly_ because the next expression on Renard’s face was alarm, immediately followed by denial, the look of someone doing some quick back tracking and some hasty math, a flash of relief he didn’t quite managed to hide and then a snide, ‘Again?’

 

It was an enjoyable moment of panic for Nick to witness and it made him smug rather than offended on Adalind’s behalf.

 

‘I was meant to be a mother,’ Adalind snapped. ‘Not why I’m here.’

 

Renard moved his gaze from Adalind to Nick, raising an eyebrow as though Nick could somehow explain. As he had no more idea what had happened to Adalind than Renard did, it wasn’t hard to put on a puzzled frown and shrug. ‘Why are you here?’ Renard put down his pen and, as though just having noticed, asked, ‘What happened to your face?’

 

‘What happened,’ Adalind practically snarled, ‘was that I got jumped by your cousin Viktor while looking at paint colours – we’re going with green (like this soft pastel green) and grey, by the way - ,’ she added to Nick, who struggled to hide a laugh when she immediately turned back to Renard who looked very much like he wanted to tell her nobody cared about paint colours, to continue saying, ‘and tossed into the back of a limo and driven out to the middle of nowhere.’

 

Nick’s attention sharpened at this news and he gave her a more thorough look over to double check she wasn’t hiding any injuries from him. Or that she didn’t have any she hadn’t noticed in her rage.

 

‘Viktor’s in town?’ Renard asked, and Nick’s attention flicked back to him. The captain had his hands folded on the desk before him – the model of calm and collected – but he looked genuinely surprised by the news that a member of his own family had arrived in Portland – apparently without his knowledge.

 

‘Viktor’s dead,’ Adalind informed them. ‘I did not appreciate being stuffed into the back of a limo.’

 

For a moment, Nick worried that there would be bodies for someone to discover, bodies that could be tied to Adalind but his tone was relaxed when he asked, ‘Need help burying the bodies?’

 

Adalind glanced up at him with a grin, reminded that she’d once asked those very words of him. ‘There aren’t any bodies because after I fought my way out of the limo Kenneth turned up.’

 

‘ _Kenneth_ is in Portland?’

 

‘You’re expecting Kenneth to clean up your mess?’ Nick didn’t know much about the man, only what stories he’d heard from Adalind when she’d decided he needed a crash course in Royal history, but he didn’t think cleaning up the body of Viktor, and any of his men Adalind had found the need to kill, was something he could be trusted to do. Not unless it served his own purposes.

 

‘Kenneth?’ Adalind scoffed, ‘Only because the King ordered it.’

 

‘The King?’ Both Nick and Adalind turned to look at Renard then, they’d never heard such a hysterical, high pitch in his voice before. He coughed and asked again, ‘My father is in town?’

 

‘I’ve had a horrible afternoon,’ Adalind reiterated.

 

‘Remember when we had no elevator and you were stuck in the loft?’ Nick asked, somewhat fondly. ‘I think I preferred that.’

 

‘Please,’ Adalind waved a dismissive hand, ‘one more day stuck in there and I was going to brave the ladder.’

 

The image of Adalind attempting (and definitely failing) to climb down the ladder heavily pregnant was made so much sweeter by the sudden sound that came out of Renard. It was like he’d swallowed something nasty, thrown it up and promptly choked on it. The expression that matched the sound was a slack jawed look of shock while Renard’s eyes darted wildly from Adalind to Nick, taking in all the details he’d missed or dismissed before. He saw the moment Renard realised how close they were standing, when he went back over the conversation they’d just had about help burying bodies, about the colours of the nursery. The ring on Adalind’s finger.

 

Renard made another unintelligible sound and, completely unhelpfully, Nick and Adalind just stood there looking at him, waiting patiently for him to either come to terms with what he was learning or have an aneurism and leave them with one less Royal to deal with.

 

Unfortunately (for a great many reasons), Renard managed to avoid the aneurism, he did have to grope around in his desk drawer for a glass and a nice bottle of scotch. The healthy swallow he took didn’t seem to clarify things in his mind and he gave a laugh that had a slightly hysterical edge to it though Nick suspected he’d been going for mocking.

 

‘You and Adalind?’ he asked Nick. Nick nodded and Renard turned to Adalind, raising his glass in salute, ‘That must have been some spell.’

 

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘Please, like I needed a spell for this, I’m naturally charming.’

 

At this, Nick snorted earning a rebuke from Adalind in the form of a gentle slap on the arm. ‘I’m sorry, you’re absolutely charming.’

 

Renard looked like the scotch he was drinking was about to make a reappearance. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked, clearly wishing they would be somewhere else so he could be alone for a bit with his thoughts and most importantly the alcohol induced ability to forget everything he’d just learned.

 

‘Viktor wanted me to give him Diana but Kenneth is here on the King’s orders because of Black Claw – though I suppose he wants Diana as well, he just didn’t ask.’

 

‘They asked you about Black Claw?’ Nick questioned. As far as they’d been able to tell, the Royals were fairing about as well against Black Claw as the wesen council, in that they’d been completely oblivious to BC until it had been pointed out to them. Which raised the question of who exactly had drawn the Royal’s notice to Black Claw and why exactly that had led Kenneth and the King to approach Adalind.

 

Adalind nodded. ‘Viktor was only interested in Diana, he wanted to make a deal with me to get her back. I think he knows that me not turning up in Austria after our deal means that I know where she is. He wanted to make a deal for her safety, he tried to tell me that she would have the best education that money could buy and that I would be allowed to stay with her.’

 

Nick frowned at that. ‘Well, at least we know his information is a little outdated and that he doesn’t have her.’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘Plus, I’m a little insulted he thought I could be bought.’

 

‘You can be bought,’ Renard said. ‘And Diana deserves the best schools.’

 

‘Diana will have the best schools,’ Adalind snapped. ‘She’ll also have parents who love her not a nanny.’

 

‘Parents?’ Renard raised an eyebrow at her use of the plural and Nick hastily cut in before their meeting about how to deal with the Royals turned into a custody disagreement that, given they didn’t actually know where Diana was, was a moot point.

 

‘If Kenneth and the King are more worried about dealing with Black Claw than getting to Diana, it says they’re starting to worry Black Claw is as much of a threat as HW makes them out to be.’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘They want to meet with you.’

 

‘Me?’ Nick asked for clarification. The last time he’d really had anything to do with the Royals there’d been a lot of killing involved. The idea that the King wanted to meet with him didn’t bode well for his continued existence. Not to mention, ‘Why does the King know we’re involved but you didn’t?’ he asked Renard. ‘You need new spies.’

 

‘Clearly.’ Renard didn’t look pleased about this new development and Nick supposed he was greatly annoyed (maybe a little jealous) that his own father hadn’t seen fit to tell him he was in town and that he’d gone first to Adalind in the hopes of approaching Nick and not just come directly to Renard who had a direct involvement and a (larger than Nick would like) certain control over the Grimm.

 

‘I don’t like it,’ Nick stated the obvious. ‘The fact that the King wants to meet doesn’t fill me with confidence. We don’t know enough about Black Claw or HW to be of any use.’

 

‘I got the impression he wants to work with us.’ Adalind’s use of the word “us” caused an amusing twitch in Renard’s jaw that Nick didn’t have time to appropriately appreciate given the topic of discussion.

 

‘Work with us or use us?’ Nick wasn’t optimistic of it being the former, the latter fit so much better with what he knew of the Royals.

 

‘Well he’s not going to be able to use us, so if he wants help handling Black Claw he’s going to have to work with us,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘I think he realised today that they’ve been underestimating me.’

 

‘Killing Viktor might have given that impression,’ Renard said wryly.

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘I think up until now they’ve assumed the assassins they did send after us were killed by the Grimm, I think it occurred to Viktor – right before he died – that maybe he should have been worrying a little less about the Grimm in Portland and a little more about the hexenbiest by his side.’

 

‘To be fair, it isn’t like we left that many of them alive to talk about it.’

 

‘True,’ Adalind conceded. ‘It’s also not like we knew which ones were sent by the Royals, which ones by Black Claw, with perhaps a few from HW tossed in.’ Adalind tilted her head, considering what she’d just said. ‘We have too many enemies.’

 

‘When you throw together everyone who wants me dead, everyone who wants you dead and the ones who want us both dead, yeah,’ Nick agreed dryly, ‘we’ve got a few enemies.’

 

‘This is why we live in a fome.’

 

‘This is why we’re upgrading the fome.’

 

‘Fome?’ Renard asked in a tone that suggested he really didn’t want to know.

 

‘It’s a cross between a fortress and a home,’ Nick explained automatically but his mind wasn’t really on the explanation he was thinking about how the sudden appearance of the King in Portland would affect their plans. They needed the auction to go ahead, both to lure out Black Claw and because they needed the money from the treasure to fund their fome. Would the fact that the Royals had come to Portland change the outcome of the auction? Would it jeopardise it or work in their favour?

 

‘Work in our favour,’ Adalind said promptly.

 

‘What auction?’ Renard asked at the same time, he looked as though any moment he would start pinching the bridge of his nose and complaining about an oncoming headache. For once, Nick didn’t blame him for being annoyed and confused. There were to many things they were trying to juggle now, too many people who knew too little or too much and none of it was helping.

 

Whether they liked it or not, they were going to have to decide whether or not they trusted Renard enough to share everything with him. They needed his experience dealing with his father and Kenneth and he was, unfortunately, the lesser of two (or maybe it was four?) evils. They were both familiar with Renard, they knew how he thought, how he worked. Whether he realised it or not, Renard was someone that Nick and Adalind could manipulate. He wanted things from them that, used the right way, could get them exactly what they wanted from him in turn.

 

The problem was trusting him enough to take advantage of it.

 

‘I think the reason the King chose now to come for a visit is because he heard about the auction – I think that’s really why he sent Kenneth.’

 

Renard frowned. ‘Kenneth isn’t really the man you send to purchase items at an auction, Viktor would have been more suited to that.’

 

‘Viktor had his own agenda,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘I don’t think the King was happy with the way he was handling things, he certainly didn’t seem upset that I’d killed him.’

 

Renard inclined his head, acknowledging the point. ‘You think we should work with them.’

 

‘We?’ Nick questioned.

 

Renard eyed them both carefully, Nick gathered he was weighing his options. Much like Nick had concluded, they could best achieve their goals with Renard’s help. Renard seemed to realise the best way to get what he wanted (power, a pet Grimm) would be to work with Nick and his friends, even if that meant working with the father he hardly knew against a common enemy.

 

‘If we do this, you’re going to have to be honest with us.’

 

Renard actually scoffed at that. ‘That goes both ways.’

 

This time it was Nick who inclined his head to acknowledge the point. ‘We need to discuss this but not here. Meet us at the Spice Shop tonight, we’ll talk about what we need to do.’

 

‘If we do this,’ Renard began, ‘things are going to have to change.’

 

‘No more lies,’ Nick agreed.

 

Adalind laughed, finding that unlikely. It earned her an unimpressed look from Renard. ‘I’ll do what I have to do to get what I want,’ he said. ‘If that means trusting a Grimm then I’ll trust a Grimm.’

 

‘Come on,’ Nick spoke before they could start an argument that really didn’t need to happen. ‘We should get you home – or to Rosalee.’

 

‘We need to go get my car,’ Adalind contradicted. ‘And those paint samples.’

 

‘And maybe something for that bruise on your jaw,’ Nick added, nodding his head at Renard as he opened the door for Adalind. ‘I think there’s still some of that paste in the first aid kit in my car.’

 

‘There should be,’ Adalind said, walking out without another word to Renard, ‘I had Rosalee replace it after Trubel got into that fight with that dickfellig.’

 

Once they were out of Renard’s office, Nick placed a hand to the small of Adalind’s back and gently guided her passed his desk and out into the hall. Hank and Wu immediately moved to follow them. Wu, he expected to follow out of concern for Adalind, Hank was a little harder to peg, but Nick assumed that no matter how uncomfortable he was with the whole thing, he didn’t like the fact that someone had put such a bruise on a pregnant woman. Especially, when that pregnant woman was Nick’s fiancée.

 

In the hall, Adalind suddenly winced, pausing to rub her belly. ‘Ugh, your son is not happy with me today.’

 

‘Well you did get him tossed in a limo and into a fight,’ Nick pointed out but he softened his words by reaching out to place his hand on her belly. He rubbed soothingly, feeling the stomping for attention calm to the occasional elbow as their son began to settle. Or tried to find room to get comfortable.

 

‘You what?’ Wu sounded alarmed. ‘Are you okay?’

 

‘We’re fine,’ Adalind assured Wu with a smile. ‘Just a little more excitement than we were expecting.’

 

Nick frowned. ‘Maybe I should take you to the doctor?’

 

‘Nick, I’m fine. Really,’ she added when he didn’t look totally convinced.

 

‘I’ll take you to the Spice Shop, we can get your car later.’

 

She started to protest but Wu volunteered to go and get her car and when even Hank said he’d take Wu over to get it she stopped protesting. The idea that Hank would do a favour for her seemed to drive home just how serious this was, just how badly things could have gone.

 

‘Fine,’ she relented. ‘You can take me to see Rosalee.’

 

Nick leant forward and placed a kiss on her temple. ‘Thank you.’

 

Wu pushed the button for the elevator and Nick caught them up on what had happened to Adalind as best he could with other officers walking by. It was easier in the elevator, they were the only ones going down to the garage and so they could talk without having to gloss over things like Viktor’s death at Adalind’s hand, the words wesen and Royal or the fact that they were debating how much they could really trust Renard. Debating Renard’s trustworthiness where they could be overheard would raise some uncomfortable questions regarding Renard’s shady activities and whether or not he was a dirty cop.

 

Strangely, of all the things he’d wanted to accuse Renard of, Nick had never had to take it that step further to being dirty. Of course, by any normal person’s definition Renard’s willingness to cover things up made him dirty but by that same reasoning Nick, Hank and Wu were all guilty of much worse crimes. If anyone ever learnt the full extent of what Nick had done he’d be facing some serious jail time.

 

Nick had never thought of it that way before and he didn’t like to now. He wasn’t a bad cop, he just had to do bad things to deal with wesen and they were things that no one else could do. The people whose opinions mattered most to him didn’t think he’d done wrong and so he wouldn’t see himself as a bad cop. He fought for the law, just in a different way. After all, you couldn’t always fight wesen using the same set of rules as you would an ordinary thief or murderer. The skills they had required a different way of handling them.

 

No, Renard could never be accused of being a dirty cop, he was, surprisingly, a decent cop. He was just mostly a despicable person.

 

In the garage, Adalind handed her car keys to Wu and followed Nick to his Land Cruiser while Wu followed behind Hank. He helped her into the passenger seat without a word, waiting until he’d started the car and was pulling out of the parking garage before he asked her what she’d left out of her retelling earlier.

 

‘Viktor and I had a little more time to talk than I made out,’ she told him. ‘He wanted to know how to get in contact with your mother – he knows she has Diana but he hasn’t been able to find her. He tried to make a deal he thought I’d accept, that’s why he offered to give Diana the very best education and anything else she could need.

 

‘I made him think I was considering his proposal long enough to get some more information from him. Viktor has been running the day to day stuff for the King but he knew nothing about Black Claw, he thought it was the Resistance killing off the Verrat – other than us, I mean.’

 

‘But the King and Kenneth knew?’

 

‘I think it’s safe to assume they’re trying to keep a lid on this new concern.’

 

‘That’s why the King came in person, why he sent Kenneth as well,’ Nick realised.

 

‘If Black Claw is gathering as many followers as HW seem to think, they might pose more of a threat to the Royals than the Resistance ever did. I don’t think it would be unrealistic to think that other surviving members of the Resistance chose to align themselves with Black Claw just like Meisner chose to work for Hadrian’s Wall.’

 

‘We can use this, though, right?’ Nick glanced over at her. ‘This gives us leverage over the Royals, we have information they need – they need me – we just need to figure out how to get what we want.’

 

Adalind nodded. ‘This could be good, if we do this right, we could finally be done with them.’

 

Nick wanted to believe her, he really did, and he guessed there was always the slim possibility they would eventually be free of the Royals wanting to control them. He was a Grimm and she was the hexenbiest who’d given the King a powerful granddaughter, he didn’t think, as hard as they wished for it, that it would be that easy.

 

‘Oh!’ Adalind cried suddenly, sounding delighted. ‘I need ice cream.’ She pointed up ahead. ‘Pull over.’

 

Huffing out a laugh, Nick did as ordered, pulling into an available parking space a few shops down. He helped her out of the car and then watched, bemused, as she struggled to put together a mountainous sundae that seemed to impress the guy behind the counter who was assembling it for her. When he asked if Nick wanted anything, he gave the mountain of ice cream and topping a dubious look and said he’d probably end up just eating half of hers.

 

The guy behind the counter nodded wisely and took Nick’s money without further comment.

 

‘You better not spill this,’ Nick warned, holding the impressive dessert in one hand and hoisting (not a word he would ever say aloud as it brought to mind things weighing roughly a ton being moved by heavy machinery) Adalind up into the car with the other.

 

She accepted her dessert back and poked out her tongue, the picture of maturity. ‘Like I’d waste any of this on your car.’

 

Laughing again, Nick got back into the driver’s seat and pulled back into traffic, heading toward their original destination. As she ate (well they shared, she offered him a spoonful every other bite), they talked about her ideas for the nursery, the colours she wanted him to look at and the furniture she wanted to buy now that they would have a proper room and not just be spreading their son’s things throughout their bedroom and the living room. That would come when he was old enough to spread his toys all over the fome.

 

Nick was looking forward to it. That picture of the future he’d had that he’d worried he’d never get with Juliette was spread before him looking better than it ever had. He couldn’t even compare the two versions anymore. What he had always imagined with Juliette positively paled in comparison to what he already had with Adalind let alone what the future would bring.

 

If he hadn’t already proposed, he’d have done it right there and then with a mouthful of fudge covered cookie dough ice cream. He settled for stealing a kiss at the next light.

 

‘Do you want to change our room much?’ he asked, knowing before he asked that she’d likely have a million and one ideas to make it more like a proper bedroom.

 

‘I think we could expand it, connect it to the bathroom and make it more liveable,’ she answered immediately, making him grin.

 

‘We could do that.’

 

‘The new extension will have a new bathroom; the kids can use that and any guests we have.’

 

‘You know we’ll have to throw a proper dinner party when it’s all finished, right? To show off everything?’ He chanced a look at her and when their eyes locked she poked her tongue out at him again.

 

‘There was no way you were getting out of that but making it sound like your idea does win you points.’

 

‘And what do these points get me?’ he teased.

 

‘Stop at the next light and maybe you’ll find out.’

 

He got another kiss, this one much longer and steamier than the previous one. They only broke apart when the driver behind them pounded on the horn. Adalind smiled widely, feeling quite pleased, he could tell, and he quickly pulled away from the light before the driver behind them could blast the horn again.

 

At the Spice Shop, Rosalee was standing in front of the shelves along the side wall discussing something with a customer. She looked over when they came in and smiled at them but continued to help the young woman, rather than come over to greet them. Adalind really did seem fine, there wasn’t any urgent need to draw Rosalee’s attention so Nick steered Adalind into the side room and onto a stool when she refused to lie down on the small bed. She was still holding the cup (really, it was more like a bucket) of ice cream and she offered him another spoonful as they waited for Rosalee.

 

While they were waiting, Nick remembered the blue powder they were hoping Rosalee could help them identify. He pulled the little bag from his pocket and held it so Adalind could see it. ‘Do you know what this is?’

 

Adalind placed the ice cream on the bench top and took the small bag from him. She tilted the bag this way and that, watching the granules shift around inside, watching the powder inside reflecting the light in dazzling sparks. ‘It looks like someone dyed sugar blue.’

 

‘You don’t know what it is?’

 

‘Should I?’

 

Nick shook his head, taking the bag back from her and dropping it onto the benchtop. ‘A witness in a case gave it to us, apparently, they’ve been selling it at her school as some sort of wonder drug. It’s supposed to make you extra focused – like a little help studying – but according to our witness it was just making her friends angry and violent.’

 

Adalind poked the bag on the bench between them with a single finger. ‘It’s a new drug?’

 

‘So our witness claims. It’s a weird case,’ Nick said and then he told her all about the three boys who had broken into a pawn shop and stolen some knives and a gun. How those three boys had met up with two of their girlfriends who had then stolen the goods and how the three boys had then been kidnapped and stuffed into a van by a couple (maybe more) wesen before the cops could catch up with them.

 

‘Where do the drugs come into things?’

 

‘The third girlfriend,’ Nick explained. ‘She skipped out on the skate park but she said she thinks that’s why they escalated from bullying to larceny and property damage.’

 

‘I don’t know anything about drugs,’ Adalind apologised without sounding the least bit sorry. ‘Do you think it’s wesen?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick answered honestly. ‘The lab couldn’t identify it but that could just mean it’s a new drug that hasn’t made a name yet or it could be because its wesen and not something she would know how to deal with.’

 

‘And you don’t know why someone would want to kidnap the boys?’

 

‘Someone kidnapped some boys?’ Rosalee asked, done with her customer and crossing into the side room. ‘New case?’ She did a double take when she saw Adalind’s jaw. ‘What happened?’

 

‘I was attacked by a Royal, sort of rescued by another and then I had tea with the King.’

 

‘You had tea with the King?!’

 

‘I’ve had a very weird day,’ Adalind informed her. ‘Hence the giant bowl of ice cream.’

 

‘Are you okay?’ Rosalee asked, reaching out to tilt Adalind’s head so she could better see the enormous bruise on the side of her friend’s face. Nick had to admit, that paste she’d concocted and kept in his car worked miracles. The colouring of the bruise was already starting to fade. In another couple of hours it would be gone altogether.

 

‘I’m fine,’ Adalind waved a hand dismissively before she scooped the bag of powder up and handed it to Rosalee. ‘Do you recognise this?’

 

Nick was expecting a reaction much like he’d gotten from Adalind but Rosalee’s eyes widened in surprise before she snatched an empty wooden bowl and poured the powder into it. ‘Where did you get this?’

 

‘From a witness in a case. Do you know what is it?’

 

‘I have no idea,’ Rosalee told them. ‘I’ve had three different customers come in over the last few months with little bags of this powder. Each of them had a loved one that was having a bad reaction to it. None of them knew where the powder had come from or what it was, only that it had made them all very sick.’

 

‘But you don’t know what it is or where it came from?’

 

‘No, that’s the thing, I’ve never seen this before.’

 

‘Were you able to cure the victims?’ Adalind inquired.

 

Rosalee shook her head. ‘I could only give them something to help with the symptoms, mostly it just wore off and they got better.’

 

‘Nick’s witness said it was making her friends agitated and caused them to lash out, though it was pitched as a study aid.’

 

‘A study aid?’ Rosalee repeated, horrified. ‘Kids are taking this?’

 

‘I don’t think it affected them as badly as it was affecting your wesen customers,’ Nick assured her. ‘Honestly, it seems like it’s just exacerbating their normal teenage moodiness.’

 

‘Well, I’m sure that’s pleasant,’ Rosalee muttered. ‘This is more powder than I’ve had before, I might be able to figure out what it’s made of and what it’s supposed to do.’

 

‘I’ll have Wu try to find the dealer. We need to know where he’s getting it and what it’s really supposed to do.’

 

‘I somehow doubt it was designed as a study aid,’ Adalind remarked.

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘I need to get back to work, we need to find those boys before something bad happens.’

 

‘If they’re really taking this stuff then I think something bad has already happened to them,’ Rosalee admitted regretfully. ‘Tell Wu to call me if he finds anything more about the powder.’

 

Nick told her he would and then asked that she keep an eye on Adalind.

 

‘I’m fine!’ she protested, even as Rosalee nodded her promise to make sure Adalind truly was just fine.

 

‘I’m supposed to worry,’ Nick informed her, placing one last kiss on her lips before he left to go back to work.

 

‘I’m fine!’ she called after him and though he believed her, he felt better knowing she was with Rosalee.


	32. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been a long time coming and so I'll thank you for sticking by me and leaving all those kudos and the wonderful comments.

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 30**

 

One day, their children would ask about the day they got married and Nick would tell them the truth. It was 2pm on a Friday afternoon, they exchanged promises, signed the paperwork and then he went back to work and Adalind went to the Spice Shop with Rosalee.

 

Glamorous it was not, but it was undeniably them and that’s what mattered most. He didn’t want their kids growing up thinking that marriage was all about that one day where you could stand up in front of friends and family and pledge your love. He wanted them to understand that it was the love, the promise, the emotion behind it that made all the difference. He wanted them to grow up understanding that they could have had the fancy wedding, the guests and a cake and music to dance to but that instead they’d chosen a quiet week day, their closest friends and the simple signing of a document because they didn’t need all the other things to tell them what they were doing was right.

 

That it would last.

 

He really could have done without the mini celebration he walked into when he did get back to work. Wu and Hank had arranged for some congratulatory balloons, some party poppers and an old-fashioned ball and chain that Nick, with some concern for what exactly his ancestors had been up to, recognised from the trailer.

 

Once they’d popped the poppers and confetti was raining down all over his desk, Wu demanded, ‘Alright, let’s see it then, the evidence.’

 

With a roll of his eyes, Nick held up his hand to show off the wedding band that loudly declared he was off the market. He would admit to feeling a little smug that there was a similar band on Adalind’s finger now but he wasn’t about to tell Hank and Wu that.

 

‘Congratulations, man,’ Hank offered earnestly. ‘This one’s going to stick.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed, accepting the slap on the back from a pair of uniforms on their way out, ‘it is.’

 

‘Okay, much as I hate to cut this little celebration short,’ Wu interrupted, shooing Nick into his desk chair and awkwardly shoving the balloons out of the way, ‘we finally got a lead on our kidnappers.’

 

As though the case weren’t already strange enough, exactly twenty-four hours after they’d been pulled into the back of a black van, the three boys had reappeared at the skate park. One moment there’d been no one at the park but a twelve-year-old girl and her older brother, the next a van (white this time) had pulled up, shoved the boys out and disappeared.

 

The girl had called the police and an ambulance while her older brother checked over the boys. All three of them were fine. Not so much as a scratch (at least not one that couldn’t be attributed to the fact that they were teenage boys) on them, no drugs in their system, no signs of abuse. As far as anyone could tell, medically speaking, the boys had simply been dropped off asleep. Perfectly normal sleep that couldn’t be attributed to any drugs.

 

The owner of the pawn shop was happy to work out a repayment deal with the parents of the boys, emphasising the extra punishment for his nephew and so while they were done dealing with the pawn shop theft they were still left puzzling over the abduction and the little bag of blue powder.

 

As if that hadn’t been strange enough for one day, let alone the day before his wedding, he and Adalind had been having dinner with Bud and his wife when Renard had called his phone, Rosalee had called Adalind’s and they’d all ended up having coffee and dessert with the King.

 

Not a sentence Nick ever thought he’d use but that was exactly what had happened. He and Adalind, along with Renard, Monroe and Rosalee had been summoned to meet with the King in his hotel room. At least they’d been treated to a phone call, Renard had been scooped up while exiting work and Monroe and Rosalee had opened their front door to answer a knock and, much like Adalind had been the day before, stuffed into a limo and driven to the meeting.

 

Kenneth answered the door when Nick knocked. Adalind stood beside him, shifting uncomfortably and rubbing at her back. She’d been experiencing false labour pains all afternoon and they’d both just been crossing their fingers they wouldn’t be postponing their wedding for a birth.

 

The man who answered the door fit the description Adalind had given perfectly. Tall, blonde with an air of arrogance that Renard had said came from always getting the results he wanted. Nick hadn’t really needed the further explanation of what those results were, he’d gotten the picture just fine. A prince of the Royals he might have been but Kenneth was more enforcer than politician and that suited Nick much better. He got along perfectly well with people who made violence their jobs, it was a lot easier to explain away killing them than it was the political powerhouses they worked for.

 

‘You must be Nick Burkhardt,’ he greeted crisply, then nodded his head at Adalind. ‘Adalind.’

 

‘Kenneth,’ Adalind said back, voice heavy with contempt. Nick just nodded and took a purposeful step forward forcing Kenneth to step back into the room. Nick gave him props for making the retreat look intentional when he took several more steps back and waved them inside.

 

Monroe and Rosalee were already there, looking incredibly uncomfortable squished onto a sofa around a coffee table with Renard in an armchair looking murderous and not even bothering to hide it. Across from their friends, in another armchair, sat a solidly built man with greying hair in an expensive suit. He didn’t get to his feet as they crossed the room even though Nick suspected his upbringing had always told him to rise when a woman entered the room.

 

Nick didn’t know if that was a show of power or if he didn’t consider Adalind worthy of the manners.

 

‘Please,’ the King said, gesturing to the limited space left on the sofa, ‘have a seat.’

 

Adalind took the spot on the sofa, easing herself down beside Rosalee while Nick chose to stay on his feet, placing himself directly behind Adalind, eyes never leaving the King, and rested a hand on the back of the sofa where his fingers brushed against the back of Adalind’s neck as a constant reminder that he was there.

 

‘I trust I don’t need to make introductions,’ Renard spoke into the tense silence. ‘Let’s just get this over with.’

 

The animosity between Renard and his father was restrained, Nick observed. His captain avoided looking at his father while never seeming to take his eyes off him. It was a neat trick. Kenneth took up a position behind the King and Nick felt like they were two opposing guards standing at attention while the people with the real power got to talking.

 

Joke was on the King and Kenneth, though because, in that room, Nick had no doubt that he and Adalind held the power and not just literally. Though between them they could (easily) have fought both Kenneth and the King it was the fact that the King wanted something from them, the fact that he needed them, that truly gave them control over the meeting.

 

‘We’re here to discuss Black Claw,’ the King said unnecessarily. ‘I understand you’ve also encountered this group and that you, Mrs Calvert, warned the Wesen Council of their existence.’

 

Rosalee nodded but it didn’t look like the King had been waiting for confirmation, he talked on without expecting her to say anything.

 

‘I understand the Council found a number of spies amongst some of their most trusted employees.’

 

That wasn’t exactly news to Nick, they’d assumed there had to have been more than one member of Black Claw working for the Council, though Rosalee had only been given one name and that had belonged to a council member not just an employee. Nick supposed that made sense, she didn’t know the employees of the Council, the important message to be passed through the network was that one had slipped through their ranks. Though Nick doubted anyone else had even gotten that much from the Council. It wasn’t too hard to guess that Rosalee’s association with a sympathetic Grimm (or three – four now) earned her a little extra information as she was likely the only one who could do anything useful with it.

 

Again, the King didn’t seem to need a response. ‘The Royal families have been similarly plagued by betrayal.’

 

Nick wasn’t in a position to see it but the almost imperceptible jerk of Monroe’s shoulders suggested his eyebrows had just shot up in surprise. Nick didn’t blame him. In his armchair, Renard had stopped pretending not to be staring at his father and his own eyes narrowed in suspicion. The King seemed entirely unperturbed by the reactions of those around him (least of all his own son’s), his eyes were locked on Nick’s – waiting for a response this time.

 

Nick hadn’t been expecting the outright admission but Adalind voiced the response sitting on the edge of Nick’s tongue waiting to be spat out with a heavy dose of sarcasm and a great deal of uncaring attitude.

 

‘That makes no difference to us,’ she pointed out. ‘Your family’s issues aren’t our problem.’

 

‘On the contrary,’ the King disagreed. ‘They’re very much your problem.’

 

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘If this is about Diana.’

 

‘It’s not about my granddaughter,’ the King interrupted and though he tried to hide it, Nick saw the brief jerk of surprise slide across Renard’s features before he put a lid on his reaction. Nick had been under the impression the King viewed Diana as a tool not an actual grandchild – something Renard had clearly assumed too. ‘For centuries, the Royal families have maintained control over the wesen much like the council have, we do not need the nature of wesen revealed to the world at large.’

 

‘Because you’d lose your power,’ Adalind said, ‘not because you care one way or the other about the impact on everyone else.’

 

‘You underestimate the importance we play in this world,’ the King informed her calmly. So far, all he’d been was calm and it reminded Nick how powerful the King was even if that power was at risk of diminishing thanks to Black Claw.

 

He still didn’t understand why they’d been summoned to this meeting. At work the next day, after his wedding, it wasn’t any clearer. As far as he’d been able to tell, there had been no purpose to the meeting. The King and Kenneth had been sizing him up, assessing the Grimm and the chosen friends he worked with. Nick didn’t know if he’d passed whatever test had been laid out for him or if the King had been satisfied by what he’d seen, he didn’t much care. Dragging Monroe and Rosalee out of their home, taking Renard from his work and pulling Nick and Adalind away from their dinner with friends had merely been a show of power.

 

They hadn’t discussed anything of consequence over coffee and dessert with the King, they’d merely gone over everything they each knew and determined that they didn’t know nearly enough to understand how Black Claw hoped to achieve their goals. No, the meeting hadn’t ever been intended to achieve anything, it had been a farce to get them all in one room to assess them.

 

Nick wouldn’t be surprised if all future interaction passed through Renard. Not that he’d seen the Captain all day. The consensus was that he was out in meetings all day but Nick wondered whether or not those meetings were normal budget, City Hall type meetings, or if he was playing to his father’s demands. While he hoped it was the former, Nick knew it was much more likely that Renard had been summoned by his father and was spending the day in awkward conversation.

 

He didn’t have much time to devote to amusing himself with the awkwardness of that situation because Wu had found something on their kidnappers and abducted teens, even if they had been returned safe, were still important. Even if the case would likely get turned over to someone else if a homicide sprung up. No one had died, no one was injured and all the stolen property had been returned.

 

At this point, they were working the case out of curiosity more than need. There were plenty of people who would only put in a half-hearted effort to solve the kidnapping mystery once the boys had been returned home safe and uninjured. Those people weren’t Nick and they didn’t know of the tenuous wesen connection.

 

And it was tenuous. There was no evidence, the kidnappers really were wesen, they could have been masks. The video footage of the abduction didn’t give them a clear enough picture. The only reason they were still keeping the wesen angle alive as a possibility was because of the three cases tied to the blue powder Rosalee still hadn’t been able to identify. They’d gotten the name of the dealer from Bethany but when Wu had gone to pick him up for questioning he’d already bolted.

 

They had an APB out on him but Nick wasn’t hopeful. Something about the whole case just didn’t sit right. It couldn’t be his only focus though. While he, Wu and Hank were trying to find the makers of the blue powder and Rosalee and Adalind were trying to find out what it was, Monroe, Trubel and Josh were working with the fence to finish the set up for the auction tomorrow night.

 

They might have agreed they were going to be more open with each other but Nick felt like the auction was going ahead just as it would have without Renard’s knowing about it or the King’s involvement. The fact the King had likely come to Portland for the auction hadn’t come up at the awkward meeting and Nick and Renard had come to a silent agreement not to bring it up. Nick was okay with taking the King’s money and Renard didn’t seem to have any issue with not keeping his father in the loop.

 

They had chosen the warehouse by the river because it was big enough to hold the number of people expected, had no access via other buildings, was easy to cover with security cameras and contained an underground storage area that only had the one door which would work perfectly for holding the items under guard while the auction was taking place.

 

Though he hadn’t said it, Nick was impressed by the speed with which the whole thing had been pulled together. They were saving time by paying a highly-qualified antiques dealer to appraise each item as it came up for auction. They likely wouldn’t get the best price but they would get a decent one and that was really all they cared about. It wasn’t like they desperately needed the money, they hadn’t even known it was a possibility before they found the secret treasure room. At this point, they were just hoping to get a decent lead on Black Claw and enough cash to pay for the renovations to their home.

 

They’d spent some time debating on how they were going to watch for Black Claw, arguing over who was best suited to go to the auction itself. Trubel, was the obvious answer as she’d been the one doing the wheeling and dealing with the fence but Nick didn’t like sending her in alone and if someone from HW turned up that might raise some awkward questions.

 

Josh was staying away for that very reason. His leg had healed up much faster than expected (confusing a number of his doctors) but he wasn’t fast enough and didn’t have enough training to take on any murderous members of Black Claw that might make him for a Grimm. They also wanted to avoid any recapture by HW until they understood just what exactly it was they wanted from him. Just because they hadn’t made a move to reclaim him while he’d been staying with Monroe didn’t mean they wouldn’t take that chance if they saw him working alongside Nick.

 

Adalind was out for obvious reasons, Renard too and not, surprisingly enough, because they didn’t trust him. They didn’t, not really, but he was too well known a face to try making a move. Not to mention how inconvenient it would be if the King or Kenneth were to make a big deal about Renard being at the auction. For the same reason, Nick couldn’t go. He would easily be spotted by the King or Kenneth but the real problem was how easily recognised he was by the wesen community of Portland. He’d made a name for himself in the city and it wouldn’t take more than a look to place who he was. If that didn’t have the buyers scattering then it might still have them attacking.

 

He wanted their money, he didn’t want them running before they could spend it.

 

Which left Rosalee, who had a legitimate reason for being at such an auction, to accompany Trubel. Monroe hadn’t been happy about it but they’d agreed it would be less noticeable for Rosalee to go (seemingly) alone than to turn up with a blutbad. A fuchsbau on her own wouldn’t draw attention but a fuchsbau with a blutbad would immediately let the room know they were being watched by the Portland Grimm.

 

Sometimes, being easily recognisable wasn’t a good thing. Nick was itching to be part of the auction but he knew he was better off listening in with Adalind and Monroe while Hank and Wu acted as security for the vault.

 

But that was tomorrows problem, right now what Nick wanted to do was track down the dealer, the kidnappers and then head home so that he could enjoy his wedding night. It was probably one of the last nights he and Adalind would have to thoroughly enjoy as a couple before their son arrived.

 

‘What did you find?’ he asked Wu, focusing his attention on the file the sergeant brought up on his computer screen.

 

‘I found you six related deaths.’

 

Nick sighed. It was his own fault really, for even thinking he would get home at a decent hour to spend time with his new wife. ‘Related to our kidnapping?’

 

‘No,’ Wu shook his head, ‘not exactly. The drug.’

 

Nick perked up a little at this and Hank leaned down to get a better look at the file on screen. ‘I thought the lab didn’t recognise the powder.’

 

‘They didn’t,’ Wu confirmed, ‘but didn’t we establish I’m awesome?’

 

Nick and Hank exchanged looks and then turned to look at Wu. ‘Did we establish that?’ Hank wondered.

 

‘News to me,’ Nick agreed.

 

Wu rolled his eyes but he was smiling smugly so the jokes just rolled right off his back. ‘I am awesome because these drug related deaths attributed to our little blue friend didn’t happen here in Portland, they didn’t even happen here in the States.’

 

Nick frowned. ‘Where’d they happen?’

 

‘Austria.’

 

‘Austria,’ Hank repeated.

 

‘Austria,’ Wu confirmed.

 

Nick swore which drew the attention of Renard who had just walked back into the precinct with a scowl on his face. Nick took that scowl to mean he had in fact been dealing with his father and not the pencil pushers at City Hall. Somehow, he didn’t think this news would cheer the captain up but he might be able to provide some insight.

 

‘They’re Royals,’ he said when he looked over the pictures and the names attached to each file. ‘Nobody significant which is how they probably came to be investigated by the local police and not whatever is left of the Verrat.’ He batted a balloon out of the way and then actually seemed to see it. He frowned. ‘What the hell is this?’

 

‘Congratulatory balloons,’ Nick replied without hesitation.

 

‘For what?’ Renard frowned.

 

‘Adalind and I got married today.’

 

If Nick had thought the scowl on Renard’s face was impressive when he walked in it was nothing to the one that glowered down at him at the news. ‘You married Adalind.’ He seemed to roll the words around in his mouth as though they tasted as foul as he thought they sounded.

 

‘Well, since I’d already knocked her up I figured why the hell not?’

 

Renard’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Really?’ He eyed Nick like he’d never before thought he was the type to go through with something like this, even out of obligation.

 

Nick snorted. ‘No, I love her, that’s why I married her.’ He rolled his eyes and then motioned back to the files on screen. ‘Does this sound like anything the Royal families would do to each other or are you thinking Black Claw?’

 

‘Could be what’s left of the Resistance,’ Wu put in.

 

Renard shook his head. ‘The Resistance is dead, I learned that much today over drinks with the King. No, this was Black Claw.’

 

‘So Black Claw is behind the blue powder? The new drug?’

 

‘Looks like.’

 

Nick blew out a breath and spun around in his chair, ‘Guess we’ll add that to the list of questions we want to ask the operative we take tomorrow.’

 

Renard frowned. ‘You’re sure this is going to work?’

 

‘Nope,’ Nick answered honestly. ‘It’s worth a shot, though.’

 

Renard didn’t look convinced but he only said, ‘Kenneth will be at the auction. I don’t know if he wants any of the items you have up for sale but he’ll be looking for an agent from Hadrian’s Wall as well.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘Hopefully, that agent won’t be Trubel.’

 

Discussion clearly done, Renard stalked into his office, closing the door firmly behind him. For a moment, the three of them just watched him through the window, wondering what they were supposed to make of this new, apparently cooperative, Renard.

 

‘It’s not going to last,’ Hank observed.

 

‘Not a chance,’ Nick agreed. ‘Still, we can use him while we wait for him to stab us in the back.’

 

‘Optimistic,’ Wu murmured. ‘I like it.’

 

Nick just turned back to the files to study the Royal victims of the blue drug, making notes of anything the Austrian authorities found that might help them track down the dealer here in Portland or at least help Rosalee find its origins.

 

‘Did you find anything?’ Adalind asked him when he got home, earlier than he’d expected but not earlier than he’d hoped.

 

‘Not really.’ He unclipped his badge and gun. ‘But it’s a new lead.’ He kicked off his boots.

 

Adalind nodded and kicked off her own shoes. ‘I suppose it’s a start.’ She reached for the hem of his t-shirt even as he tried to peel off his jacket.

 

‘It’s not much of one.’ He got started on the zip on the side of her white dress while she unbuckled his belt.

 

‘It’s more than you had,’ she pointed out, voice briefly muffled as he tugged her dress over her head. She fumbled a little with her bra while he kicked off his jeans and then gave up, deciding to leave it on.

 

‘I’m done talking.’

 

‘Works for me.’ She spun around as he gripped her hips, tugging her underwear off as she leant forward over the bed. ‘Nick -’

 

His phone rang. He ignored it in favour of slipping free of his own underwear. He kicked it aside, fingers trailing up her spine. His phone stopped.

 

Her phone started ringing and then his again, making them both freeze. There was no way anyone could not know what they had planned for the evening. It was their wedding night. Nick had left specific instructions not to call him unless one of them died and even then, only if it appeared permanent. Which of course meant that no one was likely to call them unless it was a real emergency.

 

‘Fuck.’

 

Adalind’s phone stopped ringing for the second time and his started up again. He dove for it, saw that it was Rosalee and hissed out another curse even as he slid his thumb across the screen to answer.

 

‘Are you dead?’ he demanded, voice husky and deeply annoyed. ‘Is Monroe dead?’

 

‘Nick,’ Rosalee greeted and she sounded surprised though not the least bit apologetic. ‘Your mother’s here. With Diana.’

 

It took Nick a moment to process what she’d just said because his thoughts were still clouded with sex and, frankly, that was about the last thing he would have expected her to say.

 

‘Nick,’ Rosalee said his name again, like she wasn’t sure he’d even heard her.

 

‘Ten minutes,’ he said, a lot calmer than he actually felt. He hung up on her, dropped his phone onto the bed and started to scramble for his clothes. ‘Get dressed,’ he told Adalind, tossing her his t-shirt in his haste.

 

‘Nick what’s going on?’ she sounded alarmed.

 

He paused in his scramble for clothes, dropped the belt he was holding, took her face in his hands and kissed her deeply. Then he pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against hers. ‘My mother’s in town. She has Diana with her.’

 

When Nick pulled up out front of Monroe’s, Adalind didn’t wait for him to cut the engine before she was throwing off her seatbelt and shoving the door open. Just a few months ago, her dash across the lawn and up to the front step would have been too fast for Nick to catch up to but being about ready to pop, he had enough time to dive out of the car and around to follow her up the drive. The front door burst open ahead of them and Nick winced, though he refrained from mentioning to two extra seconds it would have taken to pause and actually turn the handle.

 

He couldn’t exactly blame Adalind and he knew neither Monroe or Rosalee would hold any damage caused against her.

 

He was right behind her as she burst into the house calling Diana’s name and then he almost ploughed right into her when she stopped suddenly in the living room. His arm went to her waist to keep her upright and he saw where her gazed was locked. His mother had obviously stood when the door burst open and in her arms, she held Diana. She looked so much like Adalind, as young as she was, and that wasn’t as young as she should have been. She was only just a year old but she looked closer to two, maybe even edging on three. She pressed her face shyly into his mother’s neck and the action froze Adalind.

 

‘Diana,’ she whispered, voice thick with tears of joy.

 

Diana peered hesitantly back at her and there was a moment where she looked confused and unsure before recognition flared in her eyes and she lurched in his mother’s arms as she reached out for Adalind. ‘Mommy!’

 

That was all the encouragement Adalind needed, her feet came unstuck and she caught Diana up in a tight hug, breathing her in as more tears slid down her cheeks turning into ragged sobs. Nick moved forward then to guide her down onto the couch, careful not to jostle her too much. She was murmuring words of love to Diana and he didn’t want to get in the way of their reunion.

 

He looked to his mother who smiled at him tiredly. There was a fresh scar on her neck and a little more grey in her hair but otherwise she looked fine. ‘Hey, Nicky,’ she greeted him. ‘Did we miss it?’

 

It took Nick a moment to realise what she was talking about and then he got it. ‘Today. You missed it by a few hours.’

 

She nodded, and though he’d taken the words of her emails as confirmation the smile she bestowed on him then, the tight hug and the whispered congratulations, told him she really did accept his decision to marry Adalind. He hadn’t just been reading into that for Adalind’s sake.

 

Adalind’s grasping hand reached his arm as she tried to blindly find his own and he took her hand in his and glanced down at her. She’d shifted on the couch to get more comfortable so that Diana wasn’t resting on her unborn brother. She was lying down now and Diana was snuggled against her and pressed up against the back of her couch. Adalind looked up at him and just smiled, she was practically glowing with joy. Diana seemed perfectly content to snuggle up against her mother and she did so with a familiarity he hadn’t expected given how little time she’d spent with Adalind before they’d been separated.

 

‘Is she okay?’ Nick asked, knowing that Adalind couldn’t bring herself to voice the question just yet.

 

‘She’s fine,’ his mother assured them both and he realised he’d sounded just as worried as Adalind would have. ‘There were steps I had to take but we don’t need to talk about those now.’

 

‘I’ll get some tissues,’ Rosalee murmured and Nick only then became aware that she, Monroe and Josh were in the room. ‘Maybe some water.’ Rosalee scurried off to the kitchen wiping at her eyes, even Monroe looked a little misty eyed.

 

‘Can you stay?’ Nick asked his mother.

 

She nodded. ‘For a little while. No one’s chasing us anymore.’

 

He nodded and then looked back down at Adalind when she squeezed his hand. ‘She’s really here,’ she whispered in awe. ‘Nick,’ but she didn’t seem to know what to say.

 

He crouched down beside the couch and saw that Diana was drifting on the edge of sleep. He reached out and traced a finger down her cheek, gently pushing some of her blonde hair behind her ear. Diana’s eyes opened and locked onto his and for a moment Nick froze, remembering the way she’d once made the whole house shake. But there was no flash of purple in those eyes and Diana merely smiled sleepily and rubbed her cheek against his hand.

 

‘You got your wish,’ he told her. ‘Our family together on our wedding day.’

 

Adalind grinned up at him but the happy moment was interrupted by a startled gasp from the doorway. They’d left the front door open and no one had bothered to shut it. Juliette had just walked right in.


	33. Interlude 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Juliette, being single came as a surprise and as much as that sucked she never thought it would become permanent. She never thought Nick would move on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the wonderful comments and all the kudos!

**Necessary Sins – Interlude Two**

**Juliette**

Being single took her by surprise. The fact that it hit her so hard, that it came as such a surprise, annoyed her. She should have known, should have seen the signs. She should have paid more attention to her own feelings and to Nick’s instead of going along with it all and waiting for it to get better, for him to change his mind or for his life to settle down so that she felt comfortable changing hers.

 

She should have known that wasn’t going to happen. She remembered those months without her memory, how hard she’d fought to make sense of the weirdness surrounding Nick and the odd things he’d brought into her life. But she’d gotten her memories back and everything had been like it was before and she’d been happy. Obliviously so.

 

That was possibly her first mistake.

 

They had been happy, the two of them, even with years together, a spurned proposal and the memory loss tied up with his revealing he was a Grimm. Finally having answers to the lies and half-truths Nick had been telling had her embracing his role as a Grimm. Some days, she thought she might actually have annoyed him with her eagerness to be part of it all. Wasn’t that the point, though? To show him that she was okay with it? That she understood what his job entailed and that it necessitated some crazy hours and weird stories.

 

The shine had worn off, though, and she remembered standing up at Rosalee’s wedding and thinking how she would never have that. She stood there looking at Rosalee in her beautiful dress, exchanging words of love and devotion with Monroe and it had hit her that it would never be her up there. She would never be the one wearing the white dress and smiling in front of family and friends.

 

She remembered catching Nick’s eye during the ceremony. Well, as best she could through his dark sunglasses, and the smile he’d sent her way pulled at her and sent a strange shiver of guilt down her spine. When they’d first gotten together and talked about the future and what they wanted, it had been the same things. The same hope of marriage and kids with a home with a backyard and a dog. The kind of life Nick had before his parents died, the kind he wanted to be able to give his future family.

 

They’d moved in together and Juliette had seen it as the first step toward that future. But standing up beside Rosalee, Juliette couldn’t imagine that future any more. Not the way their life was now. All she saw was the broken windows, the blood and the violence. She saw all of the times his life as a Grimm had followed him home and the ruined dinners, the cancelled plans. She saw the friends and family Rosalee had surrounding her and she realised she didn’t talk to her own friends any more. She didn’t know how to talk to them about the weird thing her life had become.

 

She still wanted marriage and kids but she couldn’t have that with Nick. She realised that at Rosalee and Monroe’s wedding. Then, though, it wasn’t a question of what that meant. She wanted Nick, she loved Nick and she told herself that it wouldn’t be now, it might not even be soon, but things would change and she and Nick would find their way back to being that couple again.

 

She’d been stupid to think she was the only one thinking about the future.

 

When Nick started to pull away she thought it was work. She’d foolishly hoped it was Grimm related and that finally, finally he was beginning to want that future more than he wanted to be a Grimm. She’d thought the attacks on Monroe and Rosalee would have shown how dangerous being a Grimm was, how bad an environment that was for kids. That’s what it had done for her. Driven home how dangerous Nick’s lifestyle was and how that was not the place for kids.

 

She’d thought she could put those dreams on hold. That she could marry Nick and those things would come. That he would see how good that future looked and take a step back from all the Grimm problems and that he would finally be ready to have that life they’d always wanted.

 

Looking back, it was easier to see all the signs she’d missed, all the signs she’d deliberately been ignoring. She saw the way he and Trubel talked about wesen and being Grimms, saw the way he shrugged off taking a fist to the jaw or a black eye. She’d pretended not to notice that time he came home with his chest mottled black and blue and the way he winced and moved that suggested he’d gotten seriously hurt. He’d tried to hide it from her by leaving early, by coming to bed late, but she’d known and she’d hoped it would be the thing that showed him how dangerous his life was.

 

That had been her second mistake, thinking that just because she saw the danger that he would too. She mistakenly thought that if he did see the danger that it would turn him away from that life. She felt him pulling away, saw the expression on his face some nights when he would lie awake in bed when he thought she was asleep, and she’d foolishly thought he was building up to changing his mind.

 

Then had come the dinner. The fancy restaurant, the nice clothes and she’d thought he was going to propose, that despite all their words and arguments about it, that he’d finally decided to take that step back or at least the first step to getting that future they both wanted. She thought he was going to propose.

 

They broke up instead.

 

After that, everything had moved so fast she’d felt like she couldn’t catch her breath. The night they broke up he moved out, he took the things he needed or wanted and he left. She stayed up late that night, sitting on the couch with her phone in her hand willing it to ring, willing Nick to walk back through the door. He didn’t. He didn’t call her, he didn’t come back, he simply walked out of her life.

 

She went to Rosalee for advice but it was weird. She hadn’t considered that her friendship with Rosalee would be a casualty of her break up and while Rosalee made every effort to be kind and supportive, Juliette hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that Rosalee knew more about their break up than she did. Juliette hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that Nick had confided in his friends about the troubles they were having and in that moment, over tea and sympathy cookies, Juliette realised that in calling Nick’s life dangerous and violent and no place for kids, she might have insulted Rosalee.

 

Everything she said about Nick’s life as a Grimm impacting his chances of having that nice normal future went for Rosalee and Monroe too. Hadn’t the attacks by the wesenrein proved that?

 

She didn’t give up easily, she’d spent years building a life with Nick and she wasn’t about to give it all up over something that could be changed, something that could be fixed. Every time she met with him, every time she approached him he seemed a little more distant. At first, he seemed cold and annoyed, not exactly what she would have expected post-breakup but something had changed in him.

 

That morning she met him for coffee with her lawyer friend-of-a-friend, he’d been different. He’d been happy. Not happy to see her but happy in general, as though his life was good, as though he’d found a peace without her that he hadn’t been able to achieve while trying to meet her expectations. He’d sent a quick photo of the sale contract to a lawyer of his own and then five minutes later agreed what she and her lawyer had proposed was fair.

 

He’d been friendly and sincere with her friend, perfectly amiable when he’d realised that Juliette was going to keep the meeting on the topic of dividing up their assets. When it was all over he’d walked away. He’d walked away as though he were meeting with a suspect or a witness, not as though he’d just signed away the possibility of reconciling with her.

 

She’d told herself it was just a house. That selling it didn’t mean they couldn’t be together again in the future. It had been a lie; one Alicia had been quick to point out as gently as possible.

 

So she’d tried to find her own life again. She went out with friends and co-workers, she moved into an apartment with Alicia and learned anew all of the things about her friend she hadn’t known, hadn’t been able to know in college.

 

She ignored the hypocrisy.

 

She built a tentative relationship with Rosalee that had nothing to do with Nick and so she was there to support Rosalee the night they took Monroe. The night she saw a side of Nick she’d never known could exist.

 

After she got her memories back (or had it been slightly before she’d remembered everything?) Nick had been turned into one of those zombie things and she’d seen the path of destruction he’d caused in that state. It had been bad, the bar fight aftermath, the terror he’d incited in that house and the damage he’d done to the plane but she hadn’t _seen_ it.

 

That night in the forest she saw that cold ruthless Grimm again and it terrified her. He’d torn through the members of the wesenrein without hesitation, without seeming to know he was even there. He’d left just one of them alive and the look on his face had been feral. Her stomach had rolled at the sight and she’d stepped away to vomit behind a tree. Hank and Wu had been disturbed, Renard coolly surprised (she wondered later if she hadn’t seen approval in his expression) but Monroe, Rosalee and even Bud might have been taken aback but they’d simply shaken it off.

 

It was like they blinked and it was forgotten, they simply went about cleaning up the mess and doing what needed to be done to avoid having the massacre – because that what it was – tied back to them.

 

He’d driven her home that night and it was the first time she hadn’t even considered offering some words or making an effort to win him back. With Rosalee and Monroe in the backseat with Bud, she’d taken the front seat and it had been hard not to press herself firmly against the door just to get away from him. On that drive, with the massacre fresh in her mind she hadn’t liked Nick at all, had been horrified by him.

 

She didn’t really sleep that night, what sleep she did get was riddled with nightmares. The deaths of those wesenrein members replaying over and over in her head until she gave up on the idea and went to sit on the couch with tea. It was easier to think about the night with a light on and a warm mug between her hands. Somehow, sitting on that couch she managed to reconcile the man she’d first met, that young cop, fresh faced and still in uniform with the dark and unforgiving man she’d seen in the woods.

 

Her first proper encounter with wesen, the first real case she could remember, people had been dying, they’d been turned into zombies, there was blood and tears and terror. Nick dealt with that on a daily basis. Of course he was going to be darker than the man he was when they first met. Wasn’t the important thing that he could still love? That the violence she’d seen had been a reaction to someone he cared deeply for being badly hurt?

 

As the sun rose, filling the room with light, Juliette had managed to find signs of her Nick in that terrible man she’d seen the night before. She managed to come to terms with that being part of who Nick was. She stayed away from Rosalee for a few weeks, spent more time with her non-wesen friends and talking with Alicia until she felt like she was ready to see him again, until she was ready to deal with it all.

 

She still wanted the marriage and the house with the big backyard where the kids could play with a dog or two. She still wanted that with Nick because she still loved him and she still wanted to share those things with him. She couldn’t do that if she feared what his life would bring on them.

 

So she started small. She talked openly with Alicia about it, she went by the trailer a few times when she knew no one was there and she learned everything she could about wesen. When she thought she understood more about the world Nick was so deeply a part of, she called Rosalee.

 

With Alicia it was easy, her friend was part of the wesen community but she kept mostly to herself, she was quiet and respectful in a way that was both nature and a reaction to years of spousal abuse. Alicia had an ordinary office job, she went to movies and dinner and had coffee with the new friends she’d made since moving to Portland. She had ties to the wesen community but she wasn’t so deeply involved in the darker aspects of it.

 

When she thought she was comfortable with that side of things, Juliette reached out to Rosalee. They went for coffee and it was awkward. Rosalee knew things about Nick’s life that Juliette didn’t and it took a lot not to ask about him. She wanted to know that he was okay but she didn’t want to know about how happy he was without her. If he was even happy. She thought he was, wished he wasn’t.

 

She went three weeks, three separate coffee dates with Rosalee before she brought him up. Until then, they’d kept conversation to Monroe, to the Shop, to Juliette’s job and her new apartment. How she’d been trying to talk Alicia into getting a dog to help with the fear and jumpiness that came when the other woman was alone.

 

When she finally asked about Nick all she wanted to know was if he was happy and if he ever asked about her. She tried not to be bothered when Rosalee told her Nick was happy, that he was doing really well. She tried not to be hurt when she learnt he never once asked about her. At the time, Juliette wanted to believe he hadn’t asked because he didn’t know they were still in contact but she could only fool herself for so long.

 

She didn’t want to put Rosalee in the middle, so she didn’t ask again, just made do with the tiny little snippets that bled through Rosalee’s updates about the shop and married life with Monroe. When she learned Trubel was back in town with Josh she wanted to reach out. She cared about Trubel, wanted to know that she was okay but she didn’t know how to ask, Juliette didn’t know if she _could_ reach out.

 

When she’d given Nick her reasons for not wanting to start a family with him when he was a Grimm, she hadn’t thought how many people in her life, how many people she cared about, would be offended by that. She hadn’t meant to hurt Rosalee with those words but she had, she’d even managed to hurt Alicia with them and so instead of risking the hurt she might have inflicted on Trubel, she just asked Rosalee if the young Grimm was doing okay.

 

Rosalee always answered questions with the slightest hesitation that said she wondered if Juliette was aware of the hypocrisy of demanding Nick change if he wanted family but still trying so hard to remain involved in the wesen world. The problem was, Juliette had realised, is that once you know about wesen you can’t stop knowing.

 

She tried to explain that to Rosalee and she liked to think she’d done a decent job of making sense of her own mixed feelings because when she asked about a movie the coming Friday night, Rosalee had accepted, going so far as to offer dinner at home with Monroe (and Josh, because apparently Josh was staying with them) before they left.

 

Juliette wasn’t thinking about anything other than spending a nice night with friends, of repairing damage done to someone she cared about, when she pulled up out front of Rosalee’s house. Then she’d spotted the door had been left open and when she got closer she saw the splinters along the frame that showed it had been forced open.

 

Concerned, she’d been about to call out when she heard the low murmur of voices. It didn’t sound like anyone was hurt or in trouble so she walked inside. Walked right into a nightmare she wasn’t sure she’d ever recover from.

 

She saw Kelly Burkhardt first, standing next to the coffee table, dressed all in black and a fierce though tender expression on her face. Her gaze naturally followed Kelly’s until she saw that Nick was crouched beside the couch. His hair was a mess, like he’d run his hands through it a bunch of times, the laces on his boots weren’t tied and his t-shirt was wrinkled, like he’d picked up the closest thing from the floor. One hand rested on the arm of the couch, the other was outstretched cupping the cheek of a young girl.

 

The girl was lying on her side, sandwiched between Adalind and the back of the couch.

 

Juliette experienced a weird skip then, like her brain had frozen, refused to understand what she was looking at, then jumped to a new picture. Adalind’s hair was a mess, she was wearing black leggings and a shirt that didn’t sit right, it looked like a man’s shirt. It was probably the only thing that would fit over her belly.

 

Because Adlaind was pregnant. Really pregnant. Beached whale kind of pregnant and she was lying back on the couch snuggling with a girl Juliette realised had to be Diana and she was looking at Nick with such a happy, tender expression, face wet with tears and then –

 

‘You got your wish. Our family together on our wedding day.’

 

 – the sound that escaped her then was something between a gasp, a choke and painful groan because that didn’t make sense. She couldn’t have heard what she thought she’d just heard.

 

Nick spun around quickly at the sound, immediately moving to cover Adalind and Diana. Everyone in the room froze when they recognised the intruder on this moment, the moment she realised (judging from the tears) was Adalind finally reuniting with her daughter.

 

‘Juliette,’ Nick said her name in a way that suggested he was relieved to see her but was really just relieved the person who had burst through the still open front door wasn’t someone they needed to fear.

 

‘Oh,’ Rosalee gasped. ‘I’m so sorry, I forgot to call you.’ She glanced nervously over at Nick. ‘We had plans.’

 

Nick nodded and slowly got to his feet. Juliette didn’t even acknowledge Rosalee’s words, her gaze remained firmly locked on Adalind who was beginning to feel uncomfortable under her gaze. She made a move like she was about to stand and couldn’t. She murmured something to Diana that Juliette didn’t hear and the little girl wriggled upright, holding her arms out to Nick in the universal sign that a child wanted to be picked up.

 

She still didn’t say anything as she watched Nick turn slightly so he could lift Diana up off the couch and then he settled her on his hip. The movement looked natural, the way Diana’s arms immediately went around his neck and she buried her face in his shoulder. It looked natural, too, the way he held out a hand to Adalind the moment he had Diana settled and hauled the hexenbiest to her feet.

 

And, as uncharitable a thought as it was, he definitely had to haul because Adalind was huge. Juliette wished she could say the blonde had gotten fat, that she’d eaten away her depression over being separated from her child but as shocked as she was, she wasn’t blind. Adalind was absolutely pregnant. Ready to give birth pregnant.

 

And details were starting to make themselves horrible apparent. The messy hair. The wrinkled t-shirt and the unlaced boots.

 

She made a noise that she’d only ever before heard from a wounded animal and would never have imagined she was capable of making. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rosalee take a step toward her and that motion seemed to snap her out of the silent shock she’d been experiencing.

 

‘Another love potion, Adalind?’ She was trying for snide but she didn’t quite manage to hide the hurt.

 

‘No.’ It wasn’t Adalind who spoke, it wasn’t the huff of a defence but a simple and firm “no” and it had come from Nick.

 

Juliette felt her mouth twist into something that might have been a smile but felt much more like a grimace. ‘That’s some potion,’ she directed at Adalind. ‘He was pretty quick to jump to your defence.’

 

Adalind rolled her eyes but again it was Nick who spoke. ‘We’re not doing this here,’ he told her. ‘Not today.’

 

‘Doing what?’ Juliette demanded. ‘Tell me Nick what is it that you and Adalind have been doing?’

 

Rosalee said her name then and it had an edge of caution to it but Juliette didn’t want to hear it. She wanted an explanation, she wanted to understand just what the hell it was she was seeing because it didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. This thing she was seeing it couldn’t be real, there was no making sense of that, no way to put together what she knew of Nick and of Adalind and their past and mash it into something this wrong. This…vile.

 

‘We got married today,’ he told her in a calm and reasonable voice and she hated that even though he was trying to hide it, there was an undercurrent of happiness that came from saying those words that drove a shape spike of pain right through her heart.

 

‘What?’ she stuttered.

 

‘Adalind and I got married today.’

 

‘I don’t understand.’ She sounded so small then, like the words were an admission as much as they were a plea for him to explain. For Nick to please, please make sense of this, to tell her it was a joke, a lie, part of a job or a spell.

 

‘Maybe we should give them a moment,’ Josh murmured, edging toward the kitchen.

 

Juliette’s eyes darted to him, to Rosalee and Monroe and even Kelly and what she saw there sent another lightning bolt of pain through her. She saw pity. She didn’t try to stop them as the four of them quietly slipped into the kitchen. She only reacted when Kelly tried to take Diana from Nick and the girl only tightened her hold, refusing to let go of him. His quiet nod to send his mother into the next room wrenched another pained sound from her and then she was alone in Monroe and Rosalee’s living room with the man she still loved and the woman he had just married.

 

‘How?’ she found herself asking and the small look they shared made her stomach lurch as though she might be sick.

 

‘We became friends,’ Nick said slowly, ‘it developed from there.’

 

She wanted to ask how. How the hell did he become friends with the woman who had caused him so much pain? How did Adalind even become friends with him knowing, as she must, that Nick had been responsible for taking away Diana?

 

How did these two people go from hating each other so fiercely to getting married?

 

‘When?’ The question drew another shared look, a silent conversation passing between them. The kind she used to have with Nick, long before he became a Grimm and things went so horribly wrong. ‘When?’ she demanded, suddenly afraid of the answer.

 

‘Monroe’s wedding,’ Nick admitted. ‘That’s when it started.’

 

Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding. This had started back then? That didn’t make sense to Juliette, she hadn’t seen any signs that he was spending time with Adalind. Neither Monroe or Rosalee or even Trubel had mentioned the blonde back then. How had he started a relationship, what eight, almost nine months ago, and she didn’t even notice? He’d never said anything, never even hinted that Adalind was in town, why would he –

 

Nine months. Monroe and Rosalee had been married almost nine months ago. Adalind looked about ready to give birth.

 

Her stomach lurched and she stumbled blindly from the living room, fumbling her way down the hall without really seeing anything until she was in the bathroom and she was emptying her stomach into the toilet. For agonisingly long moments, she retched into the bowl, trying desperately to get control of the sobs that were shaking her body violently with each frantic attempt to catch her breath, to get hold of the nausea tangling her stomach in knots.

 

When it seemed like there was nothing left for her to bring up she fall back against the wall and let the sobs take over. They covered the sound of soft footsteps approaching the bathroom but not the quiet knock on the door. She didn’t answer, didn’t want to see anyone right then. Every person in that room had lied to her, had been lying to her for months, even before she and Nick had broken up.

 

Did they know? Had Rosalee and Monroe known what Nick had done on their wedding day? That’s what Nick had meant, hadn’t he? That this thing he had with Adalind, this horrible disgusting abomination, had started that day. She wondered if Trubel had known. What about Hank or Wu or even Bud? Had all of the people she’d considered friends known that Nick had cheated on her? That on a day they were supposed to be celebrating their friends’ union he’d been cheating on her?

 

She had to have misunderstood. That wasn’t the Nick she knew. There was another explanation, there had to be. He’d said they’d started out as friends, not lovers. Had Adalind gotten pregnant and known right away and gone to Nick for help? The idea that Adalind had gone directly to someone who she thought had just tried to help save her and her daughter from the Royals when she learned she was once more pregnant made so much more sense.

 

That had to be it. That was the kind of man Nick was. Even if he had been responsible for stealing away Diana, if Adalind had come to him, pregnant and scared, afraid for her life, he would help. That was all he had meant, that she’d come to him and that through helping her he’d gotten to know her and that was when things between them had changed.

 

That had to be it. She couldn’t see Nick marrying a pregnant Adalind for appearance sake. If he thought he loved her, he was the kind of guy who would marry her. Nick was loving and caring he would absolutely step up and claim a child who needed him if that was what he thought needed to be done.

 

That was it. He and Adalind had grown closer and that was all. He’d married her to protect her, married her because he thought it was the right thing to do. He’d –

 

No, that wasn’t Nick. Even a Nick who wanted to start a family, who wanted that future with a wife and kids and the dog with the yard to play in, he wouldn’t just marry a woman out of obligation even if the child really had been his. He wouldn’t take responsibility unless he really, truly wanted to and even then, marriage wouldn’t have been necessary for him.

 

She wished she could believe it was another spell but those looks of pity…

 

‘Juliette,’ Rosalee called softly through the door. ‘Can I come in?’

 

The door wasn’t locked. She hadn’t had time in her haste to get to the toilet to even contemplate locking it. Rosalee was asking because she knew how upset Juliette was and she wanted to know if that feeling left her wanting to be alone or if she wanted company.

 

Juliette remembered the look of pity on Rosalee’s face and she wanted to hate the fuchsbau for not telling her, for not warning her that Nick was getting married that he was even friends with Adalind in the first place.

 

Had she stepped in and taken Juliette’s place? Did she go with Nick to dinners with his friends? Did she help him with his wesen cases like Juliette once tried to do? Did she have coffee or tea with Rosalee and talk about what she wanted in the future for her unborn child? Did they talk over cookies about Rosalee’s hopes for kids in the future? Had Adalind slid into the space Juliette had left in Nick’s life, taking up an easy friendship with Monroe or the almost worship she’d once gotten from Bud?

 

The bathroom door opened slowly and Rosalee stepped inside. Juliette looked up at her, aware of how red her face must be, of the way make up must have been dribbling down her cheeks to splash onto her shirt and she saw again that look of pity on Rosalee’s face.

 

She couldn’t stop the sobs, though. Couldn’t find it in her heartbreak to push Rosalee away when the woman eased herself down onto the tiles beside her. She was grateful Rosalee didn’t try to touch her, grateful that she sat silently beside her and just let her cry it out.

 

When the tears finally stopped, Rosalee handed her a damp washcloth and waited while she tried to clean away the evidence she’d just had her heart shattered into a thousand brittle pieces.

 

She wanted to walk away then, to get up off the bathroom floor, walk out of the house and out of their lives and be done with all of the heartbreak and everything to do with Grimms and wesen but she had to know.

 

‘Is it his?’ she asked and she didn’t need to clarify for Rosalee.

 

Rosalee nodded, a single dip of her head and Juliette felt the last thread of hope of that future with Nick die.


	34. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick and Adalind get some answers regarding Diana and Nick finally has a conversation with Juliette.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the lovely comments and the kudos!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 31**

He woke with a face full of blonde hair and a small fist clenched around the sleeve of his t-shirt. Adalind’s leg was tangled between his own and at some point he’d lost his pillow in a badly one-sided fight. He didn’t open his eyes right away, this moment was one to be savoured. He lay on his back, eyes closed just breathing in the fact that this was his life. Tucked up in bed with his pregnant wife and the little girl he already considered his daughter squished between them. He hadn’t known it the night before but it really had been the perfect wedding night.

 

He and Adalind both valued family more than they needed another opportunity to have sex. His mother had managed to gift Adalind with something much more important than another chance to have increasingly less wild sex with her new husband. It made their wedding day all the more special and would be something else joyous to mark the day.

 

Diana moved in her sleep and her hair tickled his face as it slid away from him. He wrinkled his nose against the sensation and opened his eyes. Diana wriggled around a bit more and he looked down to see that she had rolled right around to face him and was studying him with an intensity he should have found unnerving. Behind her, he could see that Adalind was still asleep. She’d exhausted herself crying happy tears and any time she managed to get a full night’s sleep wasn’t to be interrupted.

 

‘Hey,’ he whispered to Diana. ‘Sleep okay?’

 

‘The baby kicks a lot,’ she informed him in an exaggerated whisper.

 

Amused, Nick grinned. ‘He does. Did he kick you?’

 

Diana nodded. ‘Do you think he likes me?’ The thought seemed to be of great concern to Diana and Nick was struck by the thought that Diana, like any kid when a younger sibling came along, was probably worried about the loss of attention. With Diana, though, it was likely a hundred times worse because Adalind had spent the last eight plus months growing their son and getting to know him (in a way) whereas Diana had been hiding with his mom.

 

‘I think he’s going to love you,’ Nick told her honestly.

 

Diana nodded again, face the picture of seriousness. ‘I’m going to love him too.’

 

His smile was soft this time, a content kind of smile. He had a lot of questions for his mother about what to expect from Diana. In the short time he’d known her as a baby she’d displayed some incredible powers but he hadn’t seen any sign of them last night and he hadn’t seen that shade of violet in her eyes. Lying beside him in the half light of day talking about how much she would love her baby brother, she seemed like a perfectly normal little girl. He didn’t want that to change, he wanted her to have the chance to be normal but she’d already grown so much in the time she’d been gone. How fast was she growing? How long would she be this little girl for?

 

On the nightstand his cell phone chirped with a new text and Adalind jerked awake. The sudden movement had Diana giggling and Nick ignored the phone for the moment in favour of watching Adalind. There was a moment, before she was properly awake, where she squeezed her eyes shut and simply listened to the sound of Diana’s laugh. Nick had no doubt that for that brief moment between sleep and wakefulness, she’d feared it had all been a dream. Then her eyes opened and she saw Diana and Nick looking at her and her smile was bright enough to light the entire room.

 

‘Morning,’ he greeted. He nudged Diana playfully toward her mother. ‘I’m going to go let the contractors in.’

 

Nick slipped from bed, leaving Adalind and Diana talking in soft quiet voices. He glanced back at them from the door and Adalind’s gaze met his own. She was smiling and radiating such happiness it really was a wonder she hadn’t found a way to light the whole room with bright sunshine. He slid the door of their bedroom open wider and slipped out into the living room. His mother was already up and dressed, mug of coffee in hand as she studied the security monitors.

 

‘Hey,’ he greeted as he passed by her to reach the new control panel that had been installed by the elevator. He pushed the appropriate buttons and on the monitors the garage doors opened to admit todays work crew.

 

‘It’s impressive,’ his mother said, eyes leaving the monitor to meet his. ‘You did good, Nicky.’

 

The praise felt weird. He’d gone so long without his mother’s approval that now it seemed wrong to be hearing it. He was old enough now that he didn’t need her approval but as a son he still wanted it. To know that she approved of what she was seeing warmed him but the fact that it did annoyed him. He supposed that was something all grown sons felt but he didn’t exactly have any experience with that kind of thing. All of his interactions with his mother since she’d come back from the dead had been all too brief when in person and short and often coded via email.

 

‘They should be starting on the loft extension today,’ he told her, moving into the kitchen to get his own coffee. ‘It’ll still be a week at the earliest before Diana will have a room.’ He filled up his mug and then looked at her over the rim as he sipped. ‘There’ll be an apartment downstairs,’ he told her. ‘Josh was planning to move in but you’re welcome to it. Or there’ll be a spare room up here. Adalind wants to turn it into an office but we could turn it into a room for you. How long are you planning on staying?’

 

She didn’t answer him right away. Last night she’d said she’d be staying for a while but how long was a while? Did that just mean she was staying for a few days or a week? Was she planning on staying or did she have somewhere else she had to be? It was a startling realisation but he didn’t know much about his mother. The first time she’d come back into his life she’d claimed to have been hiding from the people who had killed his father. She’d told him she’d spent years tracking down his killers and then she’d disappeared on a mission to destroy the coins.

 

The next time he’d seen her she’d been working with the Resistance and tasked with getting Adalind safely out of Austria. He had no idea how she’d come to work for the Resistance but he did know they didn’t exist anymore and she’d spent the last year on the run, hiding Diana from people who wanted to use her. Nick had no idea what his mother might to do now. He had no idea what she would _want_ to do now, no idea what her plans were.

 

‘I don’t know,’ she told him honestly. ‘There have been rumours about this Black Claw you asked me about. They might be worth looking into.’

 

He nodded. ‘We have something planned today to try and get hold of someone from Black Claw. Now that you’re here we can send you with Trubel instead of Rosalee.’

 

‘Trubel?’ His mother raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that a name?’

 

Nick laughed softly. ‘Theresa Rubel – but trust me, Trubel fits her better. She’s a Grimm.’

 

‘And Josh as well?’

 

‘Josh is complicated. When we met he had no idea about wesen or Grimms. His father was the Grimm, he just wanted to pass something along to me before he died. HW got hold of Josh and they tortured the Grimm out in him.’

 

‘They what?’ his mother asked, voice sharp.

 

Nick smiled grimly. ‘I told you – complicated. We have a lot to catch up on. What about Diana? Is she okay? You sent some weird emails for a bit there.’

 

His mother frowned at the change in subject but didn’t try to force it back. ‘We need to talk about Diana,’ she admitted. ‘Adalind should be here for it.’

 

‘Adalind should be here for what?’ Adalind asked, stepping out of the bedroom, Diana in her arms. She might have smiled a greeting at his mother any other time but now she was showing nothing but worry. ‘What’s going on?’

 

She moved into the kitchen to stand beside Nick, forming a barrier of sorts between Diana and his mother. Nick didn’t comment on the move, simply said, ‘I asked if Diana was okay.’

 

‘She’s different,’ Adalind told him and there was a slight edge of worry she’d probably been ignoring because she finally had her daughter back.

 

Nick didn’t know if this was a conversation they should be having in front of Diana but it wasn’t like they could send her off somewhere to play. She didn’t have a room of her own and she didn’t have any toys to play with. His mother had arrived with a single bag filled with clothes and basic supplies for Diana that had a change of clothes for her and some money stuffed inside. They would need to take Diana shopping as soon as they got the chance, she needed more than what was in that little bag. His mother needed some more things as well but she could sort her own things out.

 

‘She’s okay,’ his mother assured them. ‘There were some problems a few months ago, her powers were getting hard for her to control and she was aging too quickly. For a week she was in a lot of pain – growing pains, you could call them.’

 

Adalind hugged Diana tighter eliciting a squeak of protest from Diana who had, until that moment, been content to snuggle in her mother’s arms an ignore the conversation around her. ‘Pain?’ Adalind’s voice was strained. ‘She was in pain?’

 

His mother nodded. ‘The ritual you did to regain your powers did something to Diana, something unnatural. Her powers were strong but her body was having to grow too quickly to accommodate it. She was growing so fast we couldn’t stay in any one place more than a week and her powers were getting out of control.’

 

‘I did that to her?’ Adalind had moved beyond strained to horrified. The idea that something she’d done had caused physical harm to her daughter was almost too much to bare.

 

Nick, though, was paying enough attention to notice his mother’s continual use of the past tense. ‘What do you mean “were”?’

 

‘I took her to Europe,’ his mother explained. ‘Tracked down some people who knew about the ritual Adalind did. Eventually I found someone who thought there might be a way to reverse the effects on Diana but she couldn’t tell me the cost.’

 

‘Reverse the effects?’ Adalind repeated, voice hollow. ‘What cost?’

 

‘Undoing the effects of the spell stripped her of her powers,’ his mother explained. ‘She may never get them back.’

 

Nick got the distinct impression that had his mother been having this conversation with Renard the reactions would have been completely different. As it were, he and Adalind only had one question for his mother and Adalind beat him to asking it by half a second. ‘But she’s okay now? She’s not in any pain?’

 

His mother nodded. ‘She perfectly fine. Physically, she’s a little older than she should be, you lost about a year and a half, but she is fine. The woman who helped me assured me she will grow like any other little girl now.’

 

Adalind reacted to that news with a relieved sob that she managed to choke back for Diana’s sake. ‘She’ll be able to go to school and grow up like a normal little girl?’

 

His mother nodded. ‘There’s still a chance when she hits puberty she’ll regain her powers but it’s only a small one.’

 

Adalind shook her head. ‘I don’t care, we’ll deal with that when we have to.’ She gave Diana another tight squeeze which had Diana protesting again and then she set Diana down on the bench and smiled brightly through eyes shiny with tears. ‘How about I make us some pancakes? You like pancakes, right?’ The question was asked of Diana but Adalind cast a quick look over at his mother.

 

Nick felt a terrible pang of guilt when he realised there were so many things Adalind had missed out on, so many things she didn’t know about her own daughter because he had taken her away and sent her running off with his mother. It didn’t matter, though, they had Diana back now and they would learn all the things about Diana they had missed out on.

 

His cell phone rang and he left the three of them in the kitchen making a start on breakfast and went to answer it. As he was crossing the living room, a head popped up through the open doorway he’d been using while the elevator was out.

 

‘We good to come up and get started?’ the head of the second crew, Patrick, asked.

 

Nick nodded, without pausing. ‘We’re going to need the extension done faster than originally planned. Is that going to cause problems?’

 

Patrick’s eyes strayed over to the two new voices coming from the kitchen and nodded his understanding. ‘We can hold off on finishing off downstairs until we’re done up here.’

 

‘Thank you.’

 

The phone call was from Rosalee, telling him she and Monroe were heading to the warehouse to help Trubel and Josh set up for the auction. He told her both he and his mother would meet them there shortly but she told him he had to make a stop first.

 

‘You need to go see Juliette,’ Rosalee informed him. ‘After you left last night I talked with her a little. You owe her an explanation and I think it needs to be sooner rather than later.’

 

‘You think this will cause problems?’ That didn’t make sense to Nick but he had taken his little family home the moment Juliette had fled for the bathroom. He’d only held off leaving long enough to tell Rosalee what had happened and send her after Juliette.

 

‘No,’ she told him honestly. ‘But I think we all owe her an explanation and some peace of mind. It was unfair of us to not think about how this would hurt her.’

 

‘Today isn’t exactly a good time.’

 

‘There’ll never be a good time,’ Rosalee pointed out. ‘Get it over and done with so she can move on and we have one less thing to deal with.’ There was a pause in which Rosalee seemed to reflect on how harsh that had sounded. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

 

‘I know what you meant,’ Nick assured her. ‘I know, you’re right.’ He considered his options for a moment and then said, ‘Adalind can drop my mom off while I go speak with Juliette. She’s going to have to take Diana shopping, we have nothing for her.’

 

He could hear the smile in Rosalee’s words. ‘I’m sure Adalind will love the excuse to spend the day with Diana.’

 

‘You should join her. My mom can go to the auction in your place.’

 

‘Actually,’ Rosalee disagreed. ‘I’ll send Monroe. It’s probably a better idea to have a big and intimidating blutbad acting as bodyguard.’

 

The idea that a bodyguard to help keep Diana safe might be needed reminded Nick that he was going to have to broach the topic of Diana’s return with Renard. He had no idea how that would work or how the news would be received but the sooner Renard heard the news from Nick, the less likely he was to get angry and try to take her, as he would if he heard the news from someone else. That way, Nick could leave the issue of telling the King his granddaughter was back to Renard.

 

After he got off the phone with Rosalee, it rang again before he even had the chance to put it down. This time it was Trubel, with the news that she was at the warehouse with the fence and the antiquities expert ready to start setting up but she’d gotten a call from HW demanding she make an appearance. There was no way she could get away with not showing up, her call was more a warning that their smooth plan was already suffering setbacks.

 

He actually made it back to the kitchen to help with breakfast before his phone rang again. This time it was Wu announcing he and Hank were moving the last of the treasure into the warehouse, letting him know they’d had no trouble with it overnight. Moving the treasure to the warehouse the day before had been risky but it had proved easier to do that while he and Adalind had been around in the morning to oversee it. It meant they’d had to have someone watching over the treasure all night in the warehouse but Bud and Josh had shared the duty with Hank and Wu so it wasn’t too bad.

 

Finally, Nick was able to sit down for a nice breakfast with his family before they had to step outside of the fome and deal with the world.

 

Adalind was more than happy to ferry his mother to the warehouse to trade her with Monroe for some much-needed shopping. ‘Someone will need to do the heavy lifting,’ she pointed out. ‘We might need to take your car too.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘Call Bud if you run out of room, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind bringing his truck for you to load up.’ Bud would probably be thrilled to help out. ‘Have you got a list?’

 

Adalind held up a yellow legal pad that had been by her elbow unnoticed until now. He was so used to seeing them floating around the loft he didn’t notice them anymore. ‘I’m working on it. I had a list going for the baby but I’m going to have to wait on some things for him. Diana needs clothes and toys – a bed.’

 

‘I want a bed,’ Diana agreed. ‘Can I pick?’

 

‘Yes, baby, you can choose a bed but you won’t be able to sleep in it for a little while. We still need to build you a bedroom.’

 

The idea of having to wait before she could sleep in her brand-new bed was eclipsed by her excitement over the news she would get to have her own room. ‘And I won’t have to share?’

 

‘Nope,’ Nick assured her. ‘It will be all yours.’ To Adalind he said, ‘You don’t have to get it all now. I’m sure Diana would love to pick out things for her room when it’s ready too, right Diana?’

 

Diana nodded enthusiastically, mouth full of pancake that Nick had found himself automatically cutting up into bitesize pieces for her. ‘One piece at a time,’ his mother admonished, before reminding Adalind, ‘You need a car seat first.’

 

Nick left them making a list to have a shower, thinking about how all the stuff they needed to buy was going to eat into their treasure earnings. He wasn’t sure how much the renovation was going to cost all up, he expected there to be additional unforeseen costs and buying toys and supplies for two kids when they’d budgeted for one would definitely stretch things but Nick wasn’t worried. Once they had everything they needed, once the treasure had been sold off and the renovations were done, then he and Adalind could sit down and work out how much money they could afford to spend on certain things each week.

 

He was still thinking about the practicalities of a future with Adalind when he knocked on the door of the apartment Juliette shared with Alicia. He had no idea how his sudden appearance would be received – by either woman – but Rosalee was right to tell him not to put this off. Juliette deserved a clean break and it would be better to hit her with explanations while she was still raw from having her heart freshly stomped on than to once more reopen the wound a week or so from now.

 

He hoped he didn’t look too happy from his cosy morning with family but it was Alicia who answered his knock and she smiled at him, though a little tightly. ‘Come to explain yourself?’ she asked but there was little accusation in her tone, giving Nick the impression that she had expected him to move on. He wondered if Juliette had told her everything about their break-up and what had happened last night.

 

Did Alicia think he’d cheated on Juliette with Adalind? Did she think he’d been cheating on Juliette for months before they broke up? Maybe if he wasn’t so content with the way his life turned out he’d be more worried about what Alicia thought – because whatever Alicia thought came from things Juliette had told her – but he couldn’t work up the energy to care. Yes, he owed Juliette an explanation but he also knew he was only giving her the explanation because she’d walked in on a scene and a lot of drama had followed.

 

If Juliette hadn’t walked in when she did, he doubted he’d ever have bothered with explanations. He wouldn’t have felt like he owed her one if she’d bumped into them a few years down the track when his son was a little older and the timing a little less clear.

 

‘I’ve come to talk,’ Nick offered instead. ‘Can I talk to her?’

 

‘She doesn’t want to see you,’ Alicia told him but she stepped away from the door and motioned him inside. ‘That was a hard thing for her to see,’ she told him quietly. ‘I think she thought you’d get back together eventually.’

 

‘That was never going to happen,’ Nick explained.

 

‘I know,’ Alicia told him. ‘She told she about the break-up. I’m obligated to take her side no matter what but…’ she trailed off but Nick understood what she was saying and it answered his earlier question. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ She nodded through to the living room and then slipped down the hallway to disappear into what he assumed was her bedroom.

 

Steeling himself against the coming confrontation, Nick stepped into the living room. Juliette was sitting on the couch beneath the old blanket her grandmother had given her years ago, staring blankly at a news program on the television. She looked awful, like she hadn’t slept much at all and he felt the tiniest twinge of guilt that he immediately quashed because he’d made it perfectly clear numerous times after they broke up that they were over and he was done. He wouldn’t feel guilty for her foolishly hoping for something that he’d told her would never happen.

 

‘Juliette,’ he greeted conversationally.

 

‘Why are you here?’ she asked in a hollow voice.

 

‘To explain.’

 

‘What’s there to explain?’ she demanded. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the television.

 

‘I slept with Adalind the day of Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding,’ he told her, knowing that the blunt statement would gain her attention. And it did, she turned to look at him, switching the television off as she did and tossing the remote onto the couch beside her.

 

‘You cheated on me.’

 

He didn’t see the point in clarifying how exactly that cheating had occurred, it wasn’t any of Juliette’s business and it wouldn’t make any difference to how things went between them now. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘You were out getting your hair done or something and she came over to talk. We had sex. Twice. It was a mistake and we both recognised that but we stayed in touch. When she was attacked a couple of weeks later she called me and I went to get her and took her to the hospital. We became friends.’

 

Juliette snorted. ‘You hated her!’ she snarled at him. ‘She hated you! How do you just fall in to bed with someone who has tried to kill you, who tried to kill your friends?’

 

Nick considered how he could best phrase his next words but decided sugar coating things would get him nowhere. ‘Adalind and I have always flirted with the idea of sex,’ he said simply. ‘This time, we were both worked up enough that her throwing the drawer from my dresser at me was more of a turn on than a threat.’ Juliette looked disgusted and Nick just shrugged. ‘I didn’t just hop into bed with her after we broke up. We were friends for a long time before that happened but we both wanted more.’

 

‘And the baby?’ she asked coldly.

 

‘I don’t owe you an explanation, Juliette,’ he said firmly, clarifying he was doing this because he wanted to. ‘Adalind got pregnant that first time. We were stupid and didn’t use protection and it happened. We weren’t going to hold it against him, it wasn’t his fault we were careless. But we are happy. We love each other. We can give each other the future we both want. You could never give me that, Juliette. I could never give you that. If you’re honest with yourself, you never wanted it with me. Not once you knew what it meant that I was a Grimm.

 

‘It was a slap in the face, seeing me with Adalind and that hurt, for that I’m sorry, but you and I were never going to work. You aren’t comfortable with my lifestyle and I wasn’t going to change who I am just to please you. What Adalind and I have is real, it’s good and its strong. What we have is so much more than anything you and I ever had and I know you don’t want to hear it but I need to say it. We would have kept trying and it would have hurt both of us in the long run.

 

‘I love my wife. I love my son and the daughter I gained when I fell for Adalind. That’s my family now, that’s the future I want and I’m sorry if that hurts you but I’m not sorry for being happy.’

 

He’d said all he had to say and now it was up to Juliette. He didn’t need anything from her like she had wanted words from him but he did need to know that she’d heard his words, that she’d understood what he was saying so that he didn’t have to worry about her doing something stupid later like turning up at Rosalee’s or the Spice Shop looking for him. He didn’t need her interfering with his life as a Grimm through some misguided attempt to show him she could handle it too.

 

Juliette had never been the spiteful type before but he also knew she’d never been hurt like this before. He’d been clear on the issue of their break-up, clearer than he had to be and she’d still held out some hope that they could fix things. Despite seeing more evidence to prove otherwise somehow Juliette had held on to what they had and that tiny non-existent hope of getting it back even stronger than before.

 

In a way, it would have been almost easier if he thought Juliette did still love him, then he would understand why she was so angry at him but what Juliette was in love with was the _idea_ of him. Juliette looked at him and she still saw the young police officer she’d first met, the one she’d talked about building a future with. It had been a really long time since he’d looked at her and seen that woman. Longer than he had ever been comfortable admitting before.

 

He could look back now and pinpoint the moment when he should have let go. Taking advantage of her memory loss would have been so easy but even before then he should have heeded his aunt’s words. He should have made a clean break before the lies had started, before she’d ever been at risk of getting hurt.

 

He honestly believed he’d have ended up right where he was now, married to Adalind with a baby on the way but there would likely have been a lot less pain and trauma (not just for Juliette) along the way.

 

‘I wanted to marry you,’ Juliette told him and her tone was flat, as though she was repeating words she’d said to herself a dozen or more times until they’d lost any recognisable shape and meaning. He thought she probably had said them so many times. ‘That first day when we met, I looked at you and I could see a future with you.’

 

‘You didn’t see this future,’ Nick pointed out. ‘You didn’t see what I would become.’

 

‘It didn’t matter at first,’ Juliette told him, glancing away to stare at the blank television screen. ‘At first, everything about you started to make so much more sense. I had answers and I was seeing this whole other world that was so important to you that I wanted it to be important to me too. The difference was I still had that future in mind, the one I imagined when we first met but you didn’t.’

 

‘No,’ he countered. ‘I still wanted that future with you but my idea of the future changed to fit the shape of the people we’d become. You were holding on to a man that doesn’t exist anymore.’

 

‘I wasn’t ready to let him go.’

 

‘You don’t get to be ready,’ he told her. ‘We broke up, Juliette, and I’ve moved on. You don’t even want this life with me. I could tell you all of the dangerous things that have happened to Adalind in the last couple of months and you would be horrified. You’d have cut and run and taken my kid and I would never see you again because you would be terrified of the life you were bringing our children into.

 

‘Deep down, I think you know that. You’re not cut out for this life, Juliette, you weren’t meant to be. One day, you’re going to find a nice normal guy and you’re going to have that future of kids and a white picket fence with a yard for your dog to play in. You need that. Me? I’m building a freaking fome where my kids will be able to sleep and play behind the best security system money can buy but that doesn’t mean they won’t have the dog or the chance to play at the park.

 

‘My life scares the hell out of you Juliette but Adalind embraces that and I love her for it.’

 

The silence that hung over them after he said his piece was so thick, the tension heavy enough to cut with a knife. Nick waited to hear if she had something else to say but when she didn’t he turned to go.

 

‘I’m glad you found someone,’ she said suddenly and he turned back around to face her but she wasn’t looking at him. ‘You’re right, I could never be happy with that future.’

 

When she didn’t seem to have anything more to say he turned to leave once again. ‘Good bye, Juliette.’

 

This time he actually made it into the hallway before she called after him. ‘Nick?’

 

‘Yeah?’

 

‘What the hell is a “fome”?’


	35. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos and comments!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 32**

After his talk with Juliette, Nick would have liked to go straight to the warehouse to help prepare for the auction. Failing that, he’d have liked to meet Adalind and Diana and take over bodyguard duty from Monroe. What he actually did, was go visit Renard. That was probably last on the list of things he wanted to do on a Saturday morning. He could only hope the fact that Renard was at work and therefore in a public place, would prevent the captain from getting violent.

 

Somehow, Nick just didn’t see this conversation going well.

 

He knocked on the door of Renard’s office and pushed it open when he was called in. ‘What are you doing here?’ Renard asked, looking up from a report he was reading. ‘Don’t tell me something’s gone wrong with the auction already?’

 

Nick wanted to make a snarky comment about Renard’s lack of faith but was it really a lack of faith when they were all expecting this plan to go horribly wrong? It wasn’t just that they were relying on a fence – a man Nick and Hank both had a history with – to set the whole thing up but that Kenneth, Black Claw and HW all seemed to have stakes in its outcome.

 

Although, Nick would have preferred that to be the reason for his visit. They were all expecting it to go wrong somehow so dealing with the fallout was something he’d actually prepared for. Telling Renard that his daughter was back in town, aged more than she should be and now powerless was not.

 

Adalind had taken the news in stride, whether or not Diana had her powers made no difference to Adalind. Just another way she differed from her mother. Adalind wanted Diana safe and if that meant no longer possessing terrifying powers as a hexenbiest then that was fine by her. She loved her daughter no matter what, she knew what it was like to be turned away by her mother for no longer having powers, Adalind would never do that to Diana.

 

Renard was another question entirely. Like Catherine Schade, he had tossed Adalind aside when she’d returned from her confrontation with him powerless. He’d had no use for an ordinary woman, even one he’d supposedly had feelings for. Would he feel the same way about his daughter now that she wasn’t a powerful pawn to be used against his father?

 

It didn’t much matter what the King thought, Nick and Adalind had always planned to keep Diana as far away from the Royals as they could but that was made a little difficult where Renard was concerned. Nick had no doubt Adalind would keep Diana away from Renard if she thought she could get away with it. He had no doubt she would prefer to keep her daughter safely in the care of a family of powerful Grimms and wesen who would love her because she was Diana and not because she was crazy powerful.

 

They couldn’t keep him from his daughter, though, and Nick didn’t want to try, not unless it was a matter of Diana’s safety and wellbeing.

 

‘It’s not about the auction,’ Nick told him. ‘It’s about Diana.’

 

Renard put down the pen he’d been using to make notes and trained his entire focus on Nick. ‘What about Diana?’

 

‘She’s back in Portland.’ Straight to the point seemed to be the best way to handle this.

 

Renard’s response told Nick all he needed to know about how this conversation was going to go. ‘The King can’t know she’s here.’

 

There was no demand to see her, no urgent need to know that she was okay, simply a reminder (like Nick needed one) that Diana needed to be kept away from the King. Before he said anymore he studied Renard, looking for any sign that what he was thinking was wrong. Nick was looking for any sign that Renard wasn’t about to treat his own daughter like he’d treated her mother. He’d never had an easy job of reading Renard, if he had, there probably would have been a lot less lying in those first years as a Grimm. There probably wouldn’t have been as much betrayal, either.

 

Now, though, as much as he wanted to read Renard’s intent in his stiff posture and narrowed eyes as he quickly went through numerous scenarios, all Nick saw was a man looking for power. He didn’t see a parent eager to meet his child.

 

‘She doesn’t have her powers anymore.’ Nick dropped the news without any lead up, he didn’t want to soften this blow, he wanted as unguarded a reaction from his boss as possible.

 

Anger. That was the immediate reaction, a flicker of emotion in which Renard lost control and for a short moment he woged, showing the face of his zauberbiest to Nick’s Grimm eyes. Nick waited him out; he stood patiently behind the visitor’s chair waiting to see what Renard would say. The way his eyes flashed, his nostrils flared and his grotesque jaws gnashed was probably supposed to be threatening but Nick had never really been afraid of Renard and he lived with a much more terrifying hexenbiest. A pregnant, hormonal hexenbiest was a lot more terrifying than a part zauberbiest.

 

‘It can be reversed.’ Renard said it firmly, as though there were no question that was the case. ‘ _Blood of the Grimm_ can be reversed.’

 

Given that reversing a mouthful of Grimm’s blood was what had caused the problem in the first place, Nick didn’t imagine that would have been a good course of action even if that had been the case. Nick wasn’t even sure _Blood of the Grimm_ would have worked on Diana even if his mother had tried it. Did that kind of thing get passed through the blood? Adalind was immune to that now, had she passed that immunity on to her daughter?

 

And what did that even mean for their son? Had there ever been a part-Grimm part-hexenbiest before? It wasn’t something they’d really considered before. Their son’s conception hadn’t exactly been a well-thought and perfectly executed plan with all the what-ifs ticked off.

 

Which really wasn’t the point. ‘It can’t be reversed,’ Nick told him. ‘It isn’t as simple as that.’

 

‘Of course it can be reversed,’ Renard replied stiffly. ‘Adalind did it.’

 

‘Adalind regaining her powers is what caused this problem in the first place,’ Nick said shortly. ‘Diana wasn’t physically able to handle all that power,’ he explained. ‘It was killing her.’

 

As clearly as possible, Nick explained what had happened and how his mother had been forced to smuggle Diana into Europe to find someone who could help them. The more of the story he told, the more Renard closed off his expression until Nick could read absolutely nothing from his face.

 

‘There’s a chance she’ll get her powers back when she hits puberty but it’s a slim one,’ he finished.

 

Renard didn’t react and Nick watched him, waiting for some kind of response that would tell him Renard wasn’t going to do this wrong. He didn’t get one. What he got was a dismissive, ‘I’ll need to deal with this.’

 

Nick gave him one last chance, offering a parting, ‘Once the auction is over we can arrange a visitation schedule.’

 

Renard nodded but whether it was an acknowledgement of his words or their meaning Nick couldn’t be sure. He left Renard’s office annoyed with the captain, which, while not a new feeling, this time it had a hot edge of potential rage. Nick might have spent just one night with Diana but she was Adalind’s daughter and that was enough for him to love her. The little time he’d spent with her said she was a good kid. She’d been through a lot in her short life – a lot of pain and misery – but she smiled and laughed and played like any other kid. Nick had no doubt he would come to love her for herself and not just Adalind.

 

For all intents and purposes Diana was _his_ daughter, he was not going to let Renard hurt her the way he and Catherine had hurt Adalind. He just wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it, just yet. He supposed that depended on Renard. If it was shock making him act like an idiot, Nick could accept that. Once it wore off, there was every chance Renard would want to know more about Diana. Maybe he might even ask the first question that had been on Adalind’s lips.

 

Was Diana okay?

 

Judging by the photo Nick received in the elevator down to the parking garage, Diana was doing just fine. She and Adalind were sprawled across a twin bed pulling silly faces at the camera. There was a teasing glint in Adalind’s eye that suggested she and Diana were having a wonderful time and the message that accompanied the photo was obviously meant to be from Diana because it read “My very own bed!” and was followed by a grinning emoji.

 

The photo served to double Nick’s irritation with Renard. There was simply no way to be indifferent to his daughter, it had to be shock and the stress of dealing with the King and Kenneth.

 

At the warehouse, Nick pulled his car round back where he saw Rosalee and Hank were also parked, alongside a bike he didn’t recognise and a grey Volkswagen that looked like it was older than Nick. He slipped in through the back door and found Josh and Rosalee talking with Frankie the fence and a tall, thin woman wearing a business suit and impressively high heels. She was examining one of the cups they hadn’t deemed worthy of keeping and making notes on a legal pad. The grey Volkswagen belonged to Frankie, it was perfectly nondescript and looked nothing like the car a wealthy criminal would be driving. Either there was someone else in the warehouse or the bike belonged to the woman.

 

The woman didn’t look up when Nick approached, intent on her work. She barely even glanced in his direction when Rosalee introduced them with a quick explanation that she was the daughter of the antiquities expert – he was sick and she’d been volunteered to fill in. Nick didn’t much care, so long as someone was there to describe each piece and value it for those bidding. He didn’t bother trying to talk to her, he (like her) would prefer she concentrated on her work. They’d hopefully get more money that way.

 

‘Is Trubel back yet?’ he asked, stepping away from Frankie and Donna to speak quietly with Rosalee and Josh.

 

‘Not yet,’ Josh answered. He looked run down, like he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. Nick thought it likely he hadn’t, he and Bud having pulled the late night and early morning watch over the treasure.

 

‘Where’s my mom?’

 

‘She and Wu are making some last-minute adjustments to security,’ explained Rosalee. ‘I didn’t ask what that involved, we all thought the cameras were set up just fine.’

 

Nick had thought the cameras were enough as well, the treasure would be leaving with the buyers just hours after the close of the auction (and upon receipt of payment), it hadn’t seemed necessary to go overboard. He supposed, his mother was used to be extra vigilant when it came to security, it likely wasn’t a bad thing if she wanted to check over their plans. Maybe Wu would learn something, maybe they all would.

 

‘How did your talk with Juliette go?’ Rosalee wanted to know.

 

Nick shrugged. ‘About as well as could be expected. She didn’t throw anything at me, we didn’t really argue. I think she understands now, that there was never any chance of us getting back together and that I really am happy with Adalind.’

 

‘Good.’ Rosalee smiled ruefully. ‘What about Renard? How did that go?’

 

Nick pulled a face. ‘He was reluctant to believe Diana’s powers are gone and talked about getting them back.’

 

Rosalee frowned at that. ‘Adalind said she may never get her powers back.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘I’m worried he only wanted her when she was useful to him. I don’t want Diana getting hurt like Adalind did after I stripped her of her powers.’

 

Rosalee shook her head. ‘That won’t happen,’ she said with conviction. ‘Even if Renard doesn’t quite know how to deal, Diana has you and Adalind, she has your mother and Monroe and I, we don’t care if she has her powers, as long as she’s happy.’

 

Nick nodded, the reassurance nice to hear. He’d worry about Renard’s true reaction once there’d been time for the news to sink in.

 

He left Josh and Rosalee to finish up whatever they’d been doing with Frankie the Fence and Donna (their temporary treasure expert) and went in search of Hank. He found his partner in the storage hold where they’d stashed the treasure, sitting on a fold out metal chair looking perfectly at ease in the dark and dingy box of a room. The solid walls and just one door had made it ideal for storing the treasure overnight but that didn’t mean Nick wouldn’t be glad to see it go. He had no use for it; the sooner they were rid of it the better off they’d all be.

 

‘How’d your talk Juliette go?’ Hank asked and Nick sighed, wondering if that was going to be the first thing on everyone’s mind when they saw him. Had Hank been there when Rosalee called or had she told him? Had Adalind? It wasn’t like she could just turn up to drop off his mother and collect Monroe without someone wondering where he was but he really didn’t want to spend the rest of the day answering this question every time he saw one of his friends.

 

‘Fine,’ he answered. ‘I went with accidental hate sex over body switching spell – you know, to keep things wesen free.’

 

‘Good call,’ Wu approved, breezing into the room with Nick’s mom on his heels. The look on Hank’s face was hilarious, the one on his mother’s not so much.

 

‘Hi, mom,’ he greeted sheepishly, suddenly feeling sixteen and as though he’d gotten caught trying to sneak a girl out of his bedroom. It was a foreign feeling. The first time he’d ever had a girl stay the night his aunt hadn’t been in any position to know about it, she’d been off dealing with wesen (he now realised) and he’d had the whole house to himself for the weekend. There were a lot of things a sixteen-year-old could do with an empty house for the weekend.

 

Of course, being sixteen he hadn’t exactly known the best ways to take advantage.

 

His mother raised her eyebrows in the most mom-like expression he’d yet seen on her face. It didn’t entirely negate the scary Grimm persona, if anything it made it all the more terrifying. Nick felt a little sorry for the wesen who tried to wrong her. And a little grateful he’d never been on the receiving end of that look when he was sixteen. Not that he was glad his mother hadn’t been around, he’d have preferred to have her with that expression than not at all, he was just used to her not being there, it made it easier to joke about. It covered the bitterness and the sting of abandonment.

 

‘Are we set for security?’ he asked.

 

Wu nodded. ‘Cameras are up, covering the two entrances to the warehouse, the front where the items will be displayed and we’ve got one just outside the door of this storage room.’ Wu pointed over Nick’s shoulders to the very obviously placed camera. ‘We didn’t exactly have time to get anything better but it works.’

 

His mother stayed with the treasure while Hank and Wu led Nick out to the main warehouse floor where chairs and a small stage had been set up. There were about fifty foldable chairs arranged in front of the stage in a soft half circle, all with a good view of the stage where a table and podium had been set up. The auction room was connected to the storage area where they were keeping the treasure by a short windowless corridor.  It would be Trubel’s job to bring each piece of treasure up for display and watch over it during the bidding. Assuming she was back in time. It ensured the item was protected and added that level of gravitas for anyone able to identify Trubel as a Grimm.

 

The plan was to put Rosalee and his mother in the audience to monitor those doing the bidding. Frankie had done a decent job pulling together buyers and arranging the rules for the auction. No phone-in bids, cell phones were to be held by auction security (Wu, out of uniform and set to fingerprint every phone handed to him for safekeeping) upon entry unless they were smart enough to leave them outside in their cars or, in the case of pretentious rich assholes (like the King – well Kenneth) with their driver or security.

 

The cameras snapped photos of everyone coming in and out, which they could run through facial recognition programmes afterward. If Bud and his network of eisbibers couldn’t identify them first. That would save on time and explanations. If it weren’t for the fact they were trying to capture a member of Black Claw, they probably wouldn’t have bothered trying to identify all the buyers. Unfortunately, it was extremely unlikely the member of Black Claw would walk in looking smug and proclaiming for all the world that he was part of a powerful group of wesen banding together across the world to rise up against their human oppressors to take their rightful place in society.

 

It sounded like a stupid idea just thinking about it. Nick wondered what drunken genius had come up with the idea and which of his buddies were stupid enough to run with it until suddenly the idea had gotten out of control, picking up more and more stupid individuals until it was an enormous global problem that Nick and his friends were suddenly being forced to deal with.

 

As pathetic as it sounded, Nick had no doubt that was exactly how it started. A bunch of wesen getting together in a bar somewhere, slowly drinking themselves stupid and complaining about having to hide who they really were.

 

Yes, Nick suspected it really was as pathetic as he was making it out to be in his head. That hadn’t stopped it from becoming a dangerous threat. Some of those drunken idiots were probably very powerful wesen or at least useful wesen with friends in high places. Friends in high places who were both powerful and had a lot of money to throw around.

 

Like the Royals but wesen. Which was what Nick suspected they were. Rich and powerful old wesen families who had broken away from the wesen council when the new generation started to ask why. Why should they be in the dark? Why should wesen have to hide when they were so much more powerful? Why weren’t wesen in charge while kehrseite cowered in the shadows?

 

Just because he understood how Black Claw had come about, didn’t mean it wasn’t an incredibly stupid and short-sighted plan. Did the wesen of Black Claw think the Wesen Council and the Royals worked to cover up wesen crimes (because the Royals spent a surprising amount of time keeping a lid on such things – when they weren’t worrying about being killed off) just for the hell of it? Did they think it was about being scared to stand up and take their “rightful place”? Had it occurred to any one of them that wesen stayed in the shadows for a reason?

 

Probably not.

 

Setting up for the auction was mindless work and with them all working together it was done in no time. They didn’t bother cleaning up too much of the debris littering the warehouse. Having abandoned building supplies and random bits of paperwork floating around set the right kind of scene of an impromptu and clandestine auction skating under the local police’s radar.

 

You, know, if you weren’t aware it was actually being set up by three cops with the not-quite-blessing of a police captain.

 

The auction was set to start at 2PM. They’d talked about setting it later but after a lot of back and forth Freddie and Monroe had concluded that broad daylight set the kind of message they wanted to send. They weren’t afraid of getting caught (they weren’t technically doing anything illegal) and that they were a business just like any other. Just of the pop-up variety.

 

It helped that holding it during the day cut out the need for a generator and lighting, gave the security cameras the best chance of getting decent footage and didn’t require them to pay for the chair hire for another day. There were practical sides to holding an auction most people probably didn’t think about.

 

They were all in position by 1:30PM. Wu looking intimidating, dressed all in black and standing just outside the side door they’d designated as the entry point. It was a lot easier to monitor the comings and goings (as well as restrict entry) than if they’d used the large roller doors. Hank, also dressed in black stood guard in front of the storage room staring straight down the hallway with a stony expression. If he’d been carrying an M16 he might have looked like something out of a military film. The image was (strangely) made all the more intimidating by Trubel lounging on an empty barrel beside him, looking disinterested in everything.

 

She’d come back from HW’s secret lair with the news Meisner was in Portland meeting with Chavez and that they’d heard rumours about the auction but so far hadn’t been able to get a location. The rumours they’d heard hadn’t mentioned any Grimm involvement and they didn’t seem to suspect Trubel knew more than she was letting on. They had asked her about Josh, though, which was a first.

 

‘They want to know if he healed from his injuries faster than normal and if he’s showing any other signs of being a Grimm,’ she’d told Nick when she swung by the room he was using to monitor the cameras. It had once been a little back office. They’d cleared out enough space to set up a screen for Nick to watch the auction and it was where the images captured by the security cameras were being recorded to a hard drive.

 

‘Did you tell them anything?’

 

‘I told them he was healing and that I hadn’t seen anything Grimm-like about him.’

 

‘How did they react to that?’

 

‘Well it wasn’t a lie,’ Trubel pointed out. ‘All the wesen he’s met with since it happened have been ones he already knew, he hasn’t had the need to go all Grimm.’

 

Nick wanted to ask what exactly her definition of “all Grimm” was but he understood what she was saying and they didn’t really have the time to go into the mechanics of her evasive answers to HW. While he and Trubel had been out dealing with normal wesen problems where they regularly encountered wesen having emotional and unintentional reactions to the presence of a Grimm, Josh had been recuperating at Monroe and Rosalee’s. There hadn’t been any opportunity for him to set a wesen on edge and bring out an unintentional woge. Just because Adalind, Monroe and Rosalee had all been able to see the creepy black Grimm eyes Josh was now sporting was no reason to go ahead and say he was an ordinary Grimm like HW wanted.

 

Unless they had previous experience making Grimms? Trubel and Josh hadn’t seen any evidence of that but Nick was well aware there were plenty of things about HW Trubel and Josh didn’t know. Unfortunately, it was more a case of focusing on one problem at a time. Black Claw seemed the more active threat (the beating and torture of Josh by HW, aside) though the Royals and HW were tying in second place. HW was organised and well equipped but they were a relatively new player just like Black Claw. The Royals had centuries of practice dealing with this kind of thing. In some ways, that would have made them the bigger threat, it didn’t matter that they currently had a common goal.

 

While they’d gotten in position around the warehouse, Rosalee had taken her car and his mother and would return later, making the impression of arriving like any of the other buyers. He imagined she’d drop his mother on the road somewhere along the way so she could arrive separately and as mysteriously as she always managed to drop in and out of his life.

 

Adalind called just as the first of the buyers was arriving. Nick watched them closely on the monitor, searching for any signs that might out them as Black Claw members while he answered his phone.

 

His wife sounded exhausted but happy when she said, ‘We got everything we needed, possibly things we didn’t.’

 

‘I was expecting that,’ Nick admitted, though he was smiling when he said it. Adalind sounded so happy just to have been able to spend the morning with Diana, even if it had been spent trying to lug an almost-three-year-old (sort of) around the mall.

 

‘You and I are pretty good at getting by with the bare minimum – we’ve both had times when we’ve started over with very little – but I don’t want that for Diana. She’s already spent so much time with only what they could carry.’

 

Most children would have been too young to remember that early in their life. If Diana had been anyone else, he would have easily said she wouldn’t remember that first year and a half of her life when she was constantly moving. However, she had recognised not only Adalind right off but he, Monroe and Rosalee as well. Whether or not that was because of her powers and was a skill that would wear off now that she didn’t have them or one that would stick he didn’t know, so he couldn’t go making reassurances about Diana being too young to remember until they did know.

 

‘My only question is whether or not we currently fit in the loft with all this stuff you’ve bought,’ Nick jokingly queried.

 

‘Oh,’ Adalind replied brightly, ‘check this out.’

 

She switched their call to video and panned the camera in her phone around to show him that there was now a floor and walls where there’d once been nothing but a drop and a ladder. There were signs that the space wasn’t yet finished – the men renovating his home were good but they weren’t that good – but the extension was already well on its way to being a liveable space.

 

‘That was fast,’ Nick observed, flicking his gaze back to the security feed on the monitor and back again to scrutinise the new area Adalind already had plans on how to furnish.

 

‘It needed to be fast,’ she pointed out. ‘How’s the auction going?’

 

He turned the view on his camera around and held it so she could see his thrilling view of the auction via the monitor. ‘It’s all action,’ he joked and made to switch the camera back when Adalind stopped him.

 

‘Nick, wait, that’s Meisner.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘The man with the scruffy beard who just gave his phone to Wu, that’s Meisner.’

 

Nick leant forward to get a better look at the man on screen. Somehow, he was exactly what he’d been expecting, having heard so much about the man who helped Adalind escape Austria and put her in his mother’s care. Even from the footage he looked strong and capable, the kind of man the Resistance would have loved to use against the Royals. The fact that Meisner had helped Adalind inclined Nick to overlook the fact the man had previously worked for Renard.

 

But only just.

 

‘Trubel said he was in town but she also said HW didn’t have more than rumours about this auction.’

 

‘Clearly that changed in the couple of hours since she last saw him,’ Adalind remarked dryly. ‘What are you going to do?’

 

There’d always been the possibility of someone from HW turning up at the auction, that hadn’t been something to worry over. What was worth worrying over was the fact that pretty much any other member of HW could have walked in and blended with the crowd. Meisner was known to Black Claw and the Royals. Nick had no doubt Meisner could ignore Trubel’s role in the auction until it was all over but would Kenneth ignore Meisner’s presence or would he feel the need to antagonise him? Whether or not this became an issue for Black Claw might depend on how high up the food chain the man or woman they sent was. Nick figured the higher up the Black Claw chain of command, the more likely they were to have seen a dossier on HW.

 

The fact they were selling off Grimm treasure right around the time the body of a hexenbiest turned up in a room Black Claw was known to have been searching, suggested someone in the know. They were unlikely to risk sending someone low down on the chain of command to confirm whether the treasure was the same treasure Black Claw had been seeking when they killed Dobrini.

 

Their potentially volatile auction had just gone from potentially volatile to definitely explosive.

 

So, of course, that was when Nick spotted Henrietta on the monitor. On screen, she was showing Wu she had no phone on her and then smiled up at the camera to show she knew she was being recorded. Possibly, she even knew who was watching her as she did it. Nick still wasn’t quite sure what Henrietta was capable of, he was just glad she seemed to have taken a liking to him because he loved Adalind.

 

The view of the auction hall showed Meisner had taken a seat amongst the other buyers, Nick watched to see if he would react to Henrietta when she took her own seat toward the front. He didn’t. He did react when Kenneth walked in. Nick was still unsure how to deal with this new problem (short of letting it play out and hoping to get his money before it all went to hell) when another man entered the warehouse and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

 

He didn’t need to be in the room to know this older looking gentleman was bad news. He’d never seen Henrietta react that way to anyway – not that he’d seen her react to many people, he just imagined she was powerful and confident enough that she would rarely stiffen and falter before plastering on a wide smile.

 

The newcomer greeted Henrietta with a kiss on both cheeks but declined the chair beside her, choosing to take a seat two rows behind her. Nick hadn’t known Henrietta could be so stiff, and judging by the reaction Adalind had when he held his phone up for her to see, she hadn’t either.

 

‘He’s a member of Black Claw,’ Nick told Adalind, without needed further confirmation.

 

‘Nick,’ Adalind breathed and now she sounded truly worried, ‘I think he _is_ Black Claw.’


	36. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the continued support for this fic! We're starting to wind down now, getting closer and closer to the end. It should be about 45 chapters all up but that could change.

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 33**

Meisner took the whole waking up tied to a chair thing in stride, Nick would give him that. He lost points for the way his cold hard exterior melted slightly when Adalind stepped off the stairs and circled round into his view. Nick had to squash the twinge of annoyance he felt seeing the look. It wasn’t jealousy, Nick knew he had nothing to worry about, but the soft look on Meisner’s face rubbed at him, reminding him that this man had been there for Adalind when Nick had still been perfectly content to kill her.

 

He was perfectly content to kill Meisner, now, he didn’t think that balanced the scales, though.

 

Meisner did look strangely surprised to see Adalind, though. Happy, but surprised. He’d taken one look at Nick when he’d finished blinking off the last of the sedative Trubel had hit him with and nodded. Like he’d somewhat been expecting to find himself tied to a chair at the mercy of Nick Burkhardt. A strange thing to expect but Nick supposed when you’d spent your life working for one shady intelligence group after another, you clocked up a list of weird things you’d come to expect.

 

It wasn’t like his life as a Grimm was any different. Still, Meisner took the whole situation calmly. Seeming to accept in one quick (thorough) look at his surroundings that he was no longer snooping around the back of the warehouse after the auction and was instead in a basement – the basement of the Spice Shop to be precise. Nick didn’t know if Meisner had pieced together exactly what had happened to him yet – he had to suspect Trubel had something to do with his drugging and kidnapping, though. He didn’t think Meisner had actually seen Trubel dose him with one of Adalind’s sedative concoctions, he’d been a little busy trying to find another way in to the warehouse and subsequently in the middle of a stare down with Wu who was still playing security when she’d dosed him.

 

The auction had – to everyone’s surprise – gone off without a hitch. It had been filled with tension and the definite feeling that somebody was about to explode and kill somebody else – the look on Kenneth and Meisner’s faces when his mother had slipped into the room had been worth it alone. Kelly Burkhardt had walked into that auction with her usual calm and menacing expression firmly in place. Kenneth, who obviously knew who his mother was (and thought her dead) hadn’t quite managed to mask his surprise. Meisner had done a better job but he hadn’t been quite as successful at hiding the furtive glances he shot her way.

 

Both of them had made a point of paying attention to what she was bidding on – nothing – and whether or not she was reaching for any weapons – she hadn’t. Kenneth had only dipped his head in acknowledgment when he’d spotted Rosalee in the room and Nick had been able to pin down the moment the Royal had pegged the whole auction as a set up when Trubel had walked out holding the first item – a truly hideous jewel encrusted crown that’s value came from the fact it was made from silver and was practically dripping in rubies and pearls. Knowing it was a set-up hadn’t stopped Kenneth from bidding on a few of the less gaudy items.

 

Meisner’s recognition of Kelly Burkhardt hadn’t twigged him to the set-up but Rosalee’s presence had. Nick found that strange and it told him that Kenneth had a better understanding of how involved Nick and his friends were in the wesen goings-on of Portland than Meisner did. Kenneth could have written Rosalee’s presence off as them investigating the auction if not for the fact that Trubel was working there. Meisner had seen Rosalee and assumed it was a set-up.

 

After the auction, Kenneth had approached Rosalee directly and engaged her in a conversation congratulating them on the set-up and requested another meet where they might discuss what they’d all learned from those who had turned up for the auction. Meisner had tried the stealthy approach – possibly because he was used to sneaking around and doing things covertly.

 

Neither man had recognised Henrietta which made sense to Nick, she’d hardly have been a good option for Renard’s mother to seek out if the Royals she was running from knew the woman. Their lack of recognition when it came to Henrietta, Kenneth’s surprisingly genial attitude to getting played and Meisner’s attempt to spy told Nick more about the way the Kenneth operated and the way Meisner did differently (though similarly) but nothing was more telling than Henrietta’s obvious caution surrounding the well-dressed gentlemen who had acknowledge her with a smile and a nod.

 

Confirming, Adalind’s guess, Henrietta had used one of those strange gifts she had to send Nick a message. In the warehouse, Henrietta’s image had blurred slightly until it looked like she was leaning forward and looking directly at the camera. Her lips had moved as though she were speaking but the security cameras weren’t designed for sound and the words she was saying just turned up in Nick’s head like they’d been written on the inside of his skull.

 

It wasn’t a pleasant feeling which he supposed was fitting given the words she was saying or, well, word, because that’s what it was. A single word repeated until he’d gotten the message and Henrietta, who couldn’t actually see him, could be fairly certain her message had gotten through.

 

‘ _Bonaparte_.’

 

Whoever this Bonaparte was, he hadn’t purchased a single thing from the auction and had in fact left early when it seemed as though the item he was looking for wasn’t up for sale. That didn’t exactly narrow it down. Nick was sure the treasure was what Black Claw had been after but that still left loads of books and other items – including all those keys – that Bonaparte could have been after. Henrietta had so visibly relaxed after the man had left that his mother, who didn’t even know Henrietta had noticed. Nick had used her sudden attention to send a text to his mother’s new phone and after an appropriate waiting period she’d slipped out of the auction after the man.

 

Henrietta may have been afraid of the man but Nick trusted his mother to handle herself. With the mysterious Bonaparte gone, Nick had lost some of his interest in the auction. That man had to be Black Claw, he had the power and bearing of old money, old power and the same kind of greed and cruelty the Royals often emanated without having to say or do anything.

 

His mother’s departure hadn’t gone unnoticed by Kenneth or Meisner and Nick knew that both men would be looking into the man she’d trailed after.

 

Really, the whole thing had been a bit anticlimactic.

 

They’d learned nothing from Kenneth, Meisner had been at the auction looking for the same thing Nick and his friends had been looking for and this mysterious Bonaparte, while Nick was sure he was a high-ranking member of Black Claw (potentially the leader even), they knew nothing about him and he hadn’t heard back from his mother on whether or not she’d successfully been able to follow him. Though, the fact he hadn’t heard from her did suggest she was at least on his trail.

 

About the only positive outcome of the auction was their ability to drug and capture Meisner. Tying him to a chair in the basement of the Spice Shop for interrogation (potentially torture – though that might have been that feeling that was not jealousy speaking and a good dose of vengeance over what was done to Josh) was unlikely to get them the answers they wanted but it might prove to Meisner they weren’t the people to mess with – that was if torture came in to play. Nick was not hoping for this – Josh might have been (not seriously).

 

Having Meisner tied to a chair did raise the question as to the best way to get answers from the man. He’d shown no inclination (so far) to tell Trubel or Josh anything more than what he’d deemed need to know at HW and as much as Nick might have wanted to sit down and beat some answers out of him, he wouldn’t and honestly, Adalind would have a much better chance of getting answers form the man as he had once and (judging by the softening of his expression) still did, care about Adalind.

 

Which was why they’d all reconvened back at the Spice Shop, dragged a still unconscious Meisner downstairs and called in Adalind to do the actual interrogating. He assumed she’d left Diana upstairs with Rosalee and Monroe. Nick’s eyes hadn’t moved from Meisner when Adalind entered the room and so he’d had a pretty good view of the softening expression and confirmation that she’d been the right choice to get him talking.

 

He wasn’t about to leave her alone with Meisner, though, not after the things he’d heard HW had been doing. Also, he still couldn’t be a hundred percent sure which of the assassins that had tried to kill them both were from HW – if any. So, Nick stayed, leaning against the table with his arms crossed over his chest and a calm look on his face while Adalind slowly made her way to him, placing her directly in Meisner’s line of sight but out of reach. Trubel stuck around, too, feeling she had the right to hear what Meisner had to say after all the shit he’d put her through working for HW.

 

The look on Meisner’s face when he realised that Adalind was pregnant was a little worrying but Trubel had said he’d only recently arrived in Portland. ‘Adalind.’

 

‘Hello, Meisner,’ Adalind replied calmly. Meisner might have worn a soft expression when speaking to her but Adalind was playing betrayed and hurt like a pro. ‘You’re not working for the Resistance anymore,’ she observed.

 

‘The Resistance is dead,’ Meisner informed her. ‘You’re pregnant again.’

 

‘Yes,’ Adalind acknowledged his observation but didn’t engage him in the distraction. ‘I would have thought, after everything the Royals did to your family you would know better than to sign up with an organisation that makes a habit out of torturing innocent people.’

 

‘The father?’ Meisner inquired, apparently talking about the important things wasn’t on Meisner’s list of things to do. Nick had expected that, it was why he’d thought Adalind would be a better choice for this. He’d ask his questions, she’d ask hers and while she was building back the trust between them, Wu and Hank would be tracking the call log from his cell phone. That was going to be a hell of a lot more reliable than anything Meisner was likely to say while strapped to a chair.

 

Especially as they’d had his thumb to work with, unlocking the “super-secret” phone so that Wu could actually access the data stored on there, rather than fiddle around for hours coming up with nothing but some useless prints that weren’t registered in any system.

 

Adalind inclined her head toward him and Nick narrowed his eyes at Meisner. There were things Meisner should have already known and things that Nick expected him not to. He’d have expected Meisner to know Adalind was pregnant though not necessarily who the father was. They’d been under the impression Chavez had people keeping close watch on them now that Hank wasn’t feeding them information but either they were wrong or Chavez wasn’t passing that information on.

 

Which was something they could use, actually. It might be useful to pit Meisner against Chavez and let them tear their own organisation down. But that was probably wishful thinking.

 

For the first time since he’d woken in the basement, Meisner turned his gaze to study Nick properly. ‘A hexenbiest and a Grimm?’

 

‘Why didn’t you already know that?’ Adalind wondered. ‘Chavez has been watching us pretty closely since Josh came back.’

 

‘There are gaps in what we know,’ Meisner informed her. ‘You know more than we realised.’

 

‘I don’t think you have a good understanding of how we work here in Portland,’ Nick said, speaking for the first time. ‘Chavez seems to be focusing on the wrong things.’

 

‘Chavez has priorities of her own,’ Trubel observed.

 

Meisner didn’t frown at this but he did look over Nick’s shoulder at Trubel to careful scrutinise her. She was resting back against the shelves, fiddling idly with a set of ancient knuckle bones in a bowl on the shelf by her side. Nick had an inkling of what it was Meisner was looking for, he was trying to see how much of the Grimm operative there was in her stance, how much of the training and conditioning HW had put her through had been a lie building to this moment. Meisner was reassessing the assumptions he’d made about Trubel’s loyalties and how much her relationship with Nick and his friends had truly impacted her willingness to work for HW.

 

Nick hoped the man realised the error in judgement he’d made thinking that Trubel was the kind of Grimm who would happily play along if it meant a decent (very decent) pay check and the chance to hunt down wesen. Chavez had made that assumption based on what she’d known of Trubel’s history but Nick knew the FBI agent had changed that opinion slightly now that she had seen Trubel here in Portland. Trubel may have been acting like the loyal HW agent but Nick had no doubt Chavez was no longer fooled.

 

Which did raise the question as to what Chavez hoped to achieve by not sharing that new intelligence with Meisner. It had Nick wondering about the power structure of HW. Who was in charge of the Portland branch if something happened to Chavez? Was it really a Portland branch or just one of a handful of places they were based out of? Trubel had been sent all over the world not just the country by a woman based in Portland. Trubel had been under the impression that Chavez answered (more or less) to Meisner. Who did Meisner answer to?

 

Who was really pulling the strings?

 

Adalind did most of the talking, asking Meisner questions about the structure of HW, how it worked, who was involved and how closely they’d been monitoring them all. She very pointedly asked about their treatment of Hank and the purpose behind it but while Meisner had been quick (and mostly willing) to answer her other questions he skirted around the one about Hank until she gave up and went back to her questions about HW itself.

 

‘Who do you report to?’

 

‘We’re government funded,’ Meisner replied, as though that was enough of an answer. Nick wasn’t satisfied. Which government? Which branch of that government? As unlikely as it seemed, everything Nick knew about wesen and Grimms suggested it was extremely unlikely the US government was actively aware of wesen and had put together a task force to deal with it.

 

He felt like, if that were truly the case, there would have been some way for wesen to communicate with those officials in the know to help smooth certain issues that cropped up during cases or general wesen weirdness. Nick had no doubt that if such an organisation existed as Meisner was suggesting, that Bud would know someone who knew someone whose cousin’s stepsister’s boyfriend’s father’s grandmother was involved. That was the kind of person Bud was. If Bud didn’t know of any such thing, then Nick was willing to bet HW wasn’t some task force set up by the government to help with wesen related crime.

 

At least not one that the government actually knew about. Nick had no trouble believing one rich and powerful, well placed wesen could pull enough strings and fudge some paperwork but then wasn’t that just suggesting that HW was, in a roundabout way, the bastard cousin (military branch) of the Wesen Council?

 

The thought was not at all appealing because it suggested a certain lack of accountability. Though that lack of accountability did make sense with what Nick and his friends knew about how HW worked. Nick thought that kind of ability to turn your back and pretend it didn’t exist spoke to HW’s apparent willingness to torture an innocent man until he became a Grimm.

 

And he was doing that thing again where he ended up with more questions than answers. Plus, Adalind was getting tired of standing around in the basement asking pointless questions and Trubel was beginning to look like she really would be okay with torturing someone she’d almost respected if it meant getting the answers they actually needed.

 

Nick suspected they might have gotten more useful information out of Chavez but he hadn’t quite reached the point where kidnapping her off the street and dragging her down to the Spice Shop’s basement was a good plan. Kidnapping Meisner just seemed less likely to blow up in their faces what with his obvious soft spot for Adalind and his history with the Resistance. The fact that he’d been sneaking around an auction they’d set up had made it easier.

 

His apparent willingness to talk to them didn’t mean they untied him when they were done. Trubel cheerfully pointed out, ‘You can use this time to think about those questions you didn’t want to answer. Refresh your memory.’

 

Whether or not Meisner would still be tied to the chair when they went back down later would depend on how cooperative he was feeling. Nick suspected, if he truly wanted to escape, Meisner could easily slip his bindings. He was banking on curiosity and his fondness for Adalind to keep him in place.

 

Nick followed Adalind up the stairs, Trubel on his heels and closed the basement door firmly. His hearing would let him know if Meisner tried to escape. He hadn’t decided whether or not to let him just yet. Diana was sprawled on the floor drawing on a sketchpad with bright coloured pencils while Rosalee kept one eye on her and one on the shop. Josh and Rosalee looked up when they came in but it was Monroe who spoke.

 

‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What did he say?’

 

‘Not a lot,’ Adalind admitted. ‘Most of what he said we already knew or had figured out for ourselves.’

 

‘It was nice to have some of it confirmed,’ Nick added. ‘But we didn’t learn much more.’

 

‘Did we learn anything?’ Rosalee asked.

 

‘Meisner says they’re government funded but he couldn’t be specific,’ Adalind began. ‘He’s in charge – though I don’t know if that’s just now or if that’s always been the case here. Chavez apparently answers to him. He did confirm they were trying to bring the Grimm out in Josh and that it was the first time they tried it – though he admits he doesn’t know everything Chavez has been up to. If he knows what they were doing to Hank – and why – he wasn’t talking.’

 

‘Did he say anything about Black Claw?’

 

‘I don’t think he knows where they came from any more than we do but he did say they’re a relatively new group. Meisner joined HW about a year ago, right before the Resistance fell, as far as he knows they were active for at least five years before that.’

 

‘I’m not buying that.’ Nick shook his head. ‘If Black Claw had been around that long, we’d know about it.’

 

‘I have to agree,’ said Rosalee. ‘My brother had a lot of contacts through his more illegal business ventures and he knew nothing of Black Claw – he never mentioned them and I’ve been through everything he left behind looking for any sign of them.’

 

‘That Bonaparte guy wasn’t young, though,’ Trubel pointed out, alluding to their earlier supposition that it had been a youthful rebellion that had gained strength. ‘If you’re right and he is their leader – which Meisner couldn’t confirm,’ she added in an aside for Monroe, Rosalee and Josh, ‘then its possible Black Claw has been around longer than even HW realised.’

 

‘I think I can answer that question now.’

 

The bell over the door hadn’t chimed to alert them anyone had entered the shop but given that it was Henrietta, Nick wasn’t surprised. ‘You knew who that man was,’ Nick stated. ‘He scared you.’

 

‘His name is Conrad Bonaparte,’ Henrietta replied. ‘You should be afraid of him.’

 

Nick glanced at Adalind to see if the addition of a first name was ringing any bells but she shook her head. It wasn’t a name Monroe or Rosalee were familiar with either and for all her work with HW Trubel had never come across it.

 

‘He’s a zauberbiest,’ Adalind guessed. ‘A powerful one?’

 

‘More powerful than any other I’ve come across,’ Henrietta admitted. ‘He was a friend of my father’s – he’s older than he looks,’ she added, forestalling what had clearly been Trubel’s next question. ‘Bonaparte and my father were part of a secret society, I thought once that my father claimed Bonaparte was their leader. The purpose of the society was to support other powerful wesen – mostly hexenbiests and zauberbiests and help gain control and maintain it. I never knew the name of the society, I would never have thought they’d name it something so crude as Black Claw.’

 

‘You think it’s the same?’ Rosalee wondered. ‘You think that secret society has evolved into Black Claw?’

 

‘Yes,’ Henrietta confirmed. ‘Bonaparte was always ambitious and he has many powerful friends. I do believe these men could have turned their secret society into this threat. They’ve been around a long time, they’ve had plenty of time to gather like-minded individuals to their cause.’

 

Henrietta’s theory that a secret society of wealthy and powerful men (likely spanning generations of wesen) had morphed into a worldwide group advocating the right for wesen to take charge and step out of the shadows certainly fit with the feeling Nick had got of a bunch of drunken idiots running with a bad idea. Having a better idea of how Black Claw had got its start was one thing, using this information to their advantage was another.

 

‘How does this help us stop them?’ Trubel wanted to know.

 

‘It gives us somewhere to look,’ Nick reasoned. ‘We have a name now – two if we use Henrietta’s father to narrow it down. With this we might be able to link other people to Black Claw. If we can find the founders, we can stop them.’

 

‘Why do I feel like it’s not going to be that easy?’ Monroe muttered.

 

‘Because it never is?’ Adalind smiled grimly. ‘We need to talk to Meisner again,’ she said with a sigh. ‘We need to know if he’s heard of Bonaparte’s little secret society. Did your father ever call it by a name?’ she asked Henrietta.

 

Henrietta shook her head. ‘To him it was just a group of old family friends. I never knew my mother but I think that was how they met.’

 

‘Any idea how many members there might be?’ Nick asked. ‘Anyone else you know of that might have been involved?’

 

Adalind wrinkled her nose, beating Henrietta to answer the question. ‘Sean’s mother might know something. That was how you met, wasn’t it?’ she hazarded.

 

Henrietta nodded. ‘Her mother and uncle were members. They didn’t meet at our house but we saw them sometimes at society functions.’

 

Nick wanted to ask what functions but decided he didn’t actually want to know just yet. The idea that they would need to consult with Renard’s mother took all the joy out of this new discovery. Nick also hadn’t had the chance to talk to Adalind about Renard’s reaction to Diana’s return and her lost powers. He felt like that was a conversation they needed to have before they contacted Renard about a secret society his mother might know something about.

 

Nick also wasn’t sure they wanted to bring Renard’s mother into things seeing as the King was in town. He had enough to worry about with Renard dealing with the King, Nick just didn’t feel like adding past infidelity onto the list of reasons why having the King in town was a terrible idea was the way to go. He had never gotten the full story from Renard regarding the events surrounding his mother fleeing Europe with him, Adalind didn’t even know it, so Nick couldn’t say how well the need to contact Renard’s mother would go down. There was no doubt in Nick’s mind that the woman would come to town once she learned that Diana was back. He didn’t think she’d stopped asking after her granddaughter just because Renard had stopped bringing it up.

 

Would she have the same reaction Renard had to learning her granddaughter was no longer an amazingly powerful hexenbiest? Would she care that there was a possibility Diana would never regain her powers? Nick didn’t know nearly enough about the woman to pass judgement on her, he was still holding out hope (purely for Diana’s sake) that Renard had merely been in shock.

 

Pulling his mind back to the matter at hand, Nick asked Henrietta if she had anything of her father’s that might help them track down other members of this secret society.

 

‘I’ll have to look,’ she said. ‘I put those things away a long time ago. After my father died I didn’t want to look at it.’

 

Nick could understand that but he was eager to know if anything in her possession might give them the answers they needed to bring down Black Claw and return their life in Portland to something resembling normalcy. Normalcy for a Grimm, anyway.

 

‘Even if we manage to stop Black Claw, that still leaves us HW to deal with.’

 

Each of them shot Trubel a look that said they were well aware there was still more work to be done but could they just deal with this one thing at a time?

 

‘And the Royals,’ she added with a smirk.

 

‘Without Black Claw, do you think there will still be a HW?’ wondered Monroe. ‘What else would they deal with?’

 

‘I doubt HW was created just to deal with Black Claw,’ Rosalee murmured though she didn’t seem convinced, in fact she looked like something had just occurred to her and it didn’t look like it was a good thing.

 

‘What?’ Adalind demanded, obviously having caught the look as Nick did.

 

Rosalee shook her head. ‘No, it’s nothing,’ she dismissed. ‘I’m just being silly.’

 

‘If you say so.’ Adalind didn’t look convinced but Rosalee was done with the topic so Adalind went back to her original complaint, ‘We need to talk to Meisner again.’

 

‘If we go back down there he’s going to try and get us to work for HW.’ It was a though that had been buzzing in the back of his mind since they’d first brought Meisner in. If Black Claw really was such a threat then it stood to reason that now that Meisner was in town and they’d met, that the man would try and talk him into working for them. Chavez had been very clearly avoiding directly confronting him but kidnapping Meisner opened up the possibility of recruiting him without any of the cloak and dagger bullshit they’d used when they’d first kidnapped Trubel off the side of the road.

 

‘It should be HW working for us,’ Monroe huffed with faux indignation but he followed Adalind and Trubel back down the basement stairs. Diana stopped Nick with a tug on his pant leg before he could follow. There weren’t any angry shouts or swearing so Nick assumed Meisner had decided to cooperate and stay tied to his chair. Henrietta hesitated before slipping away, not seeing the need to stick around now that she’d said her piece.

 

Nick crouched down beside her and Diana put down her pencil and looked up at him. The brief glance he gave her drawing showed him this was another area she was well advanced in for her age. Her drawing was more detailed than he would have expected with clear and obvious distinction between the stick figure she’d drawn. Nick had a sneaking suspicion the choice to draw only stick figures had been intentional. He sincerely hoped he was exaggerating that, though.

 

‘Where’s Grandma?’ she asked.

 

It took Nick a moment longer than it probably should have to realise she was talking about his mother. ‘She’s following a bad man.’

 

‘Oh.’ Diana took this in stride, seeming to understand more than he’d like. ‘Is the bad man going to hurt her?’

 

‘I hope not,’ Nick replied.

 

‘Is she going to hurt the bad man?’

 

Nick let out a surprised laugh. ‘Possibly.’

 

‘Oh.’ Diana thought about this for a moment and then nodded her head. ‘Good.’

 

Nick shared an amused look with Rosalee before he asked Diana if she was going to be okay staying with Rosalee for a bit longer. Diana had already gone back to her drawing though so Nick dropped a kiss on the top of her head and pushed himself back to his feet.

 

‘I don’t want to keep him here overnight,’ he told Rosalee, assuring her they wouldn’t be using her basement as a cell. ‘I’d prefer to be able to use him.’

 

‘Do you think Adalind will be able to get the answers we need from him?’

 

Nick didn’t, not really, but he still thought she had a better chance of it than anyone else. ‘I’d really just like to know enough to stop HW too,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t like the idea of a shady government agency kidnapping and torturing potential Grimms. Not to mention what they did to Hank and what they’re probably doing to countless others.’

 

‘Do you really think they’re that bad?’ Rosalee asked, voicing the question Nick had been pondering all along about HW.

 

‘No,’ Nick told Rosalee. ‘I think they might just be worse.’


	37. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos and comments!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 34**

‘This is a terrible idea,’ Adalind said for the fifth time.

 

‘It was your idea,’ Nick pointed out without any sense of blame. Adalind might have been the one to suggest they take Meisner up on his offer but Nick agreed it was the best way to get the information they needed on HW as well as Black Claw.

 

‘I think we both know I have had some truly awful ideas before.’

 

‘Do you trust Meisner?’

 

‘About as far as I can throw him.’

 

‘You’re a pretty powerful hexenbiest,’ Nick reasoned. ‘That’s actually pretty far.’

 

‘No,’ Trubel spoke up from the back seat, leaning forward to poke her head between the seats into the front. ‘Adalind’s right, this is a terrible idea.’

 

Nick chanced a glance at them both and saw Adalind nodding her head, pleased that Trubel was agreeing with her. Trubel, for her part, didn’t look thrilled to be playing tour guide to the Portland HW facility but she’d also thought it was their best option. At least that was what they’d all agreed on from the safety of the loft. Nick could have left Adalind there, left her to watch over Diana and keep his mother and Josh company while his mother gave Josh a quick crash course on how to fight like a Grimm but they were banking on her relationship with Meisner to keep HW honest.

 

‘We could have just kidnapped Chavez,’ Nick reasoned. ‘I’m feeling okay with that plan now.’

 

Adalind rolled her eyes. ‘Kidnapping Chavez doesn’t give us access to their resources,’ pointing this out to Nick seemed to remind her why she’d thought visiting HW was a good idea in the first place and she rallied a little, sitting straighter in her seat with a determined look on her face.

 

‘I know,’ Nick agreed. ‘But you’re right, this is a terrible idea.’

 

‘We need to know more about Bonaparte and this is our best shot.’

 

‘Unless you want to run him at work again,’ Trubel teased. ‘I’m sure that fifth search will turn up everything we need.’

 

She might have been exaggerating but she wasn’t wrong. Nick, Hank and Wu – even Renard with his additional resources – hadn’t been able to turn up anything on Conrad Bonaparte. All their searches using their own credentials had gotten them nowhere. All they knew was the basic information Interpol had been able to give them – which was false because Henrietta’s own memories of the man said he was older than the birth date on his passport would have them believe. If that nugget of information was wrong, then what point was there in taking anything else on the passport as truth?

 

Stopping Black Claw was their priority. Nick had more resources than ever before with the Royals in Portland and HW apparently offering their assistance (without strings which Nick would believe when he saw it) but that didn’t mean they were the only thing he and his friends were dealing with. It had been a matter of division of labour. Renard and his relatives were using their political connections to learn what they could about HW while Nick and his friends dealt with Black Claw.

 

It seemed Kenneth had a bit of a soft spot for Rosalee (freaked them all out but he seemed to find her brand of ruthlessness intriguing), he’d been awfully accommodating when they’d gathered once more to discuss new leads. This time they’d met at the Spice Shop, it wasn’t quite neutral ground but there were a lot of things on hand at the shop that Rosalee could throw together in a pinch – some of which exploded – that made it a safer spot for them to meet with the Royals. It had been a loaded enough meeting and one Nick wasn’t sure he could ever have expected.

 

There were certain moments of that meeting Nick would have liked to scrub permanently from his brain but Adalind had assured him while she was good for the memory loss did they really want the coma and crazy that followed?

 

The night of the auction, Nick had gone back down into the basement to find Adalind already removing Meisner’s bonds. Nick hadn’t really been surprised. The man was unlikely to give them what they truly needed while tied to a chair. Nick still doubted he would willingly give them anything they actually wanted but he had held out hope Adalind would work her charms. And she had, for the most part. Meisner’s soft spot for Adalind meant that once he was out of the chair and had a better grasp of what was going on, he was surprisingly cooperative. Though he still couldn’t tell them what happened to Hank (or why). He did promise to look into it, though, and as that was more than Nick had been expecting he took it for the olive branch it was.

 

With Meisner not tied up, things had gone a lot smoother. Nick couldn’t say he trusted the man but he trusted that Meisner would do the right thing for the greater good which for the moment had to be enough. They’d talked around the idea for an hour, going back and forth over what they knew and didn’t know about Black Claw, comparing notes which, even for HW, seemed woefully lacking in detail. Meisner had offered more them once to bring Nick into HW but every time he brought it up it had the ring of a trap to it. As though, accepting Meisner’s offer to work with them was really him agreeing to work _for_ them and Nick was not about to sign up for that. It was bad enough they had a hold over Trubel.

 

They’d parted ways with Meisner with an agreement to share information and the promise (from Meisner) that there would be no more drugging or kidnapping of friends. They’d all gone home, gotten some sleep and woken to the sound of cell phones ringing and a summons to meet with the King.

 

Nick and Adalind had warranted a personal call from the King himself which was alarming, the reason for it doubly so. ‘I wish to meet my granddaughter.’

 

The idea that the King would turn out to be a loving grandfather was not something any of them had expected. History didn’t exactly suggest he knew what to do with illegitimate blood relations and certainly not ones with hexenbiest blood. Adalind had wanted to refuse, had in fact tried to refuse and argue against it but Renard had turned out to be the voice of reason there, pointing out that demonstrating the absence of those extraordinary powers might free Diana of the Royals once and for all.

 

Nick had to bite back a scathing question as to whether or not that went for Renard as well, settling only for the layered, ‘I guess you want to meet your daughter, too.’

 

With the exception of his mother, who had found her way back to Monroe’s the previous night and then slipped out into the dawn light with a piece of toast in hand and the brief message that she was returning to pick up the trail of Bonaparte, they all assembled at the Spice Shop. Hank and Wu brought breakfast but there was a nervous energy in the air that had more than one of them just picking at the pastries.

 

Renard had arrived first and there’d been an awkward moment where he’d frozen in the doorway between sections of the shop with his gaze glued to Diana who was sitting in Nick’s lap (having no trouble wolfing down her own breakfast – Wu got points for the nutritionally sound child friendly yogurt and fruit). It seemed like Renard didn’t know how to react to the return of his daughter, the reality of a girl aged rapidly who was old enough that she should know her own father but possibly wouldn’t remember him wasn’t something he was prepared for. It wasn’t something you could prepare for, really.

 

In that moment, Nick had regretted the fact that they’d been too busy dealing with Black Claw and the auction to take the time to sit down and talk with Diana about her family situation. She called his mother “grandma”, referred to Adalind (and had even recognised Adalind) as “mom” and while he was a probably confusing grey area who had been fulfilling the role of dad even if she called him by name, no one had actually mentioned Renard to Diana in his capacity as her father. They hadn’t had the chance (or frankly the inclination) to find out what Diana remembered of her father or even what his mother had told her.

 

The softening of features and the gentle, ‘Diana,’ Renard finally managed eased some of the tension Nick had been feeling.

 

Diana had looked up from her breakfast and looked at Renard in confusion before she’d burrowed herself back into Nick shyly, offering her biological father a smile. It was the same behaviour she’d displayed before she’d recognised Adalind but it didn’t look likely to let up. She didn’t remember Renard, not yet, and the flash of disappointment in his eyes had immediately been masked and he’d stepped into the room the cool and collected son of a Royal.

 

Nick hadn’t liked the twinge of sympathy he felt for Renard at that moment but he wasn’t sure how to ease the moment for Diana or her father. Adalind’s expression wasn’t sympathetic, she didn’t want Diana anywhere near Renard and the Royal drama so Nick knew not to expect any help from her. Feeling uncomfortable as hell (and like he was giving up something that wasn’t rightfully his in the first place) Nick had been the one to try and patch the moment between father and daughter.

 

‘Diana,’ he’d said quietly, ‘why don’t you say hi to your dad?’

 

Renard clearly hadn’t been expecting Nick to say anything, it almost looked like he’d been expecting Nick to ignore the role he played in Diana’s life entirely, but he recovered from the surprise quickly enough and stepped forward with that soft smile on his face again. It scared the hell out of Nick for obvious reasons but it eased some of the tension he could feel in Diana.

 

‘Hi,’ she greeted Renard shyly.

 

‘Hi,’ Renard replied, coming to stand in front Nick but with enough space between them that he wasn’t crowding Diana – or Nick. Renard looked like he wanted to say something else but didn’t know what or maybe even how. The rest of the rooms occupants were trying to give them some privacy but the room was only so big and the respectful silence felt awkward and uncomfortable.

 

Nick liked to think that was why, Renard suddenly straightened with a very obvious clearing of his throat and moved away so that he was addressing the room from a much safer position by the basement door. ‘What do we know?’

 

The answer to that question had been, ‘Not much,’ and come from Wu. ‘The phone we took off Meisner didn’t give us much at all. We got six traceable numbers – all to the Portland area, one of them was Trubel’s, another Chavez’s, we put a trace on them and the others so we can track whoever is using them but I don’t know how useful that will be.’

 

Nick was grateful they didn’t have to rehash the auction again for Renard, Hank and Wu having updated him when they returned to work with all those prints to run.

 

‘Do you know the name Conrad Bonaparte?’ Nick asked Renard, willing (for the moment) to overlook the way Renard took his Captain persona and used it to take charge when he really wasn’t in any positon to start handing out orders and instructions.

 

‘That’s the man Henrietta identified?’ Renard checked. He shook his head when they nodded. ‘I called my mother, it’s possible she knows something but she refused to tell me over the phone.’

 

‘She’s coming to Portland?’ Adalind guessed. ‘When?’

 

Renard didn’t know and without her passing any information on to him there wasn’t much more to be said on the subject. ‘Is Meisner going to work with us on this?’

 

‘I think you’re the best person to answer that,’ Nick replied. ‘You’ve known him longer than any of us. He’s worked for you before,’ Nick pointed out.

 

Renard nodded. ‘Meisner lost his family to the Royals, working for or with me gave him the opportunity to fight back against them – I don’t know where his loyalties lie anymore. I don’t know if we can trust him.’

 

‘How did he even learn about HW?’ Adalind wondered aloud, wincing at what Nick gathered was a particularly powerful kick from their son. He reached out to run his hand over the spot and Diana copied his motion, twisting sideways across his lap and leaning forward to press both hands firmly against Adalind’s belly, face pressed in close to murmur a greeting. Nick switched his grip to place an arm around Diana’s middle so she wouldn’t slide off his lap, grinning when the look on Adalind’s face suggested having his big sister’s attention was causing more kicking.

 

There was a longer pause than normal before Renard spoke again. When Nick looked up at him he saw the man had closed off his expression again but he hadn’t quite managed to hide the strange combination of disgust and envy before Nick caught it.

 

‘I haven’t been able to contact him,’ he explained. ‘I’ve spoken to a number of people who had connections with the Resistance and they’re under the impression that there was a woman asking questions shortly before the Resistance fell.’

 

‘Questions?’ Monroe repeated. ‘What kind of questions?’

 

‘The recruitment kind,’ Renard answered.

 

‘Doesn’t that just seem a little too coincidental?’ Rosalee frowned. ‘This woman starts asking questions and then the Resistance falls?’

 

‘Yes, Mrs Calvert that does seem rather coincidental, doesn’t it?’

 

Nick would have to add the ability to get around the bell over a shop door to the list of mysterious abilities Kenneth seemed to possess. For someone who was perfectly ordinary he seemed to be strangely adept at sneaking around wesen and Grimms. And Nick was perfectly aware that was a really strange thing to be thinking about but his mind got stuck on that strange detail for a moment because it was easier to examine than the respectful appreciation he saw on Kenneth’s face as he gazed at Rosalee.

 

The King was right behind Kenneth, radiating a quiet power that still set Nick’s teeth on edge even though he was coming to see that the Royals were nothing more than human. In a room full of his own people – included three Grimms, a hexenbiest, a fuchsbau and a blutbad – the threat of the King and Kenneth seemed so small. It was a disturbingly disappointing thing to realise. A realisation that wasn’t exactly new but was reinforced there in the Spice Shop.

 

The power the Royals had over Nick and his friends just didn’t exist anymore.

 

Monroe, who didn’t like the way Kenneth was eyeing his wife, said, ‘I thought you guys destroyed the Resistance?’

 

‘We did not,’ the King announced. ‘The Resistance served a purpose, we saw no reason to destroy it entirely.’

 

Rosalee seemed to be nodding thoughtfully at his words. ‘HW sent someone in to recruit useful members of the Resistance and then had the rest of them killed,’ she gathered.

 

‘They have the resources,’ Trubel murmured. ‘But could they have done it without Meisner knowing? He’s pretty high up in HW.’

 

‘He wasn’t always,’ Josh pointed out. ‘Someone had to be in charge before he came along.’

 

‘Do you know who?’ Renard asked.

 

Both Josh and Trubel shook their heads. Nick shifted on his stool when Diana wriggled around trying to get a better angle without face planting against Adalind and her baby brother. The conversation continued around them, Josh and Trubel trying to place what they knew of the leadership of HW while Nick and Diana engaged in a silent battle for balance. Just as Josh was remembering the name of another Grimm who might have the answers they needed, Diana settled for draping herself sideways across his lap so that her feet were now in Trubel’s lap and her shoulders resting against Adalind’s belly.

 

The King startled them all by laughing heartily. Conversation ground to a halt and they turned to look at the King who was watching Diana with the kind of expression you’d expect to see on the face of an indulgent grandparent. Renard’s expression had lost all pretence of being calm and stoic in the face of his father’s delight. Nick, for his part, had no idea how to react. He’d expected plenty of reactions from the King but laughter and what seemed to be genuine joy wasn’t anywhere on the list.

 

That was potentially more terrifying than if he’d turned around and tried to kidnap Diana right then and there.

 

In the wake of bringing the room to a complete standstill (even Kenneth looked surprised), the King walked around the bench and bent so his head was level with Diana’s. Nick saw Adalind flinch but she didn’t move. Every instinct Nick had was screaming at him to pull away, to kill the King, but he grabbed hold of the desire and held it firm. The King wasn’t threatening, he hadn’t made any motion to take Diana, he seemed content to smile and talk to her.

 

‘When your father was very young he used to climb all over me when I was trying to conduct business.’

 

Nick had never known, before that moment, that silence could carry such astonishment it almost had a category of silence all its own. There was just nothing any of them could say to that. Judging by the look on Renard’s face, this wasn’t something he’d ever known or remembered. The look of astonishment on his face was comical. The idea that the King had been involved in any way in Renard’s early years had never occurred to Nick. Sure, royalty had a funny view of bastard children but Nick had been under the impression that due to the fact that Renard was the son of a hexenbiest and the product of a much-hated affair, he hadn’t actually spent all that much time with his father.

 

Nick supposed that could still be true but that didn’t change the absolutely staggering nature of the King’s words.

 

‘Perhaps, for the moment, you should let your mother rest? I see there are some colouring books for you, why don’t you show me what you’re working on?’

 

Diana considered this proposal for a moment and it struck Nick that she hadn’t shied away from the man as she’d done with Renard. Even though Adalind had flinched and Diana must have felt that, she didn’t shy away or try to ignore him. Diana seemed to decide the King’s idea had merit and she held her arms out so that he could lift her out of their laps. The entire room watched, slack jawed, as the King set Diana up on the floor with her colouring books by the sofa and took a seat so that he could ask her questions about what she was colouring.

 

Nick and Renard exchanged disturbed looks, both on the exact same page when it came to the King’s unexpected move.

 

Aware that they were well within hearing range and not caring, Monroe blurted, ‘What the hell just happened?’

 

‘I feel violated,’ Adalind muttered and Nick couldn’t blame her. The display of genuine caring and tenderness was so outrageously wrong Nick wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’d fallen sideways off his chair and into another universe.

 

Renard was regarding his father and daughter with a look that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but jealousy. Nick wasn’t about to touch that with a ten-foot pole so with immense effort, he tore his eyes from the strange picture of the King and his granddaughter bonding over colouring and got back to the point of the meeting. Adalind’s gaze remained glued on the King but that was alright with Nick. He trusted her to use her powers on the King the moment it looked like he was set to try something.

 

‘Uh,’ Nick scrambled to remember what they’d just been talking about.

 

‘I’ll see if I can’t call that Grimm,’ Trubel murmured, saving him the trouble.

 

‘Right.’ Nick coughed to clear his throat and hopefully the weird tension in the air. He turned to Kenneth. ‘We believe the man behind Black Claw is a zauberbiest named Conrad Bonaparte. Do you recognise the name?’

 

‘No,’ he said simply. ‘What do you know about him?’

 

‘Not much,’ Nick admitted. ‘Only that he was part of a secret society of wesen before this. It seems like that secret society created Black Claw or maybe even is Black Claw.’

 

‘A secret society?’ Kenneth raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ll have to ask around but I’m not familiar with any such group – not one that is still around in any case.’

 

Some people might have taken that to mean Kenneth was aware of such groups in the past but Nick took him to mean that any such groups had since been destroyed by him or on his orders. Nick didn’t like the man but he couldn’t argue that Kenneth got the job done. That was the kind of man they needed to fight off Black Claw, Nick just wished he believed their working relationship would end with Black Claw. Crawling in bed with the Royals was never going to be a good idea.

 

They’d discussed the fall of the Resistance, the rise of Black Claw and HW some more but the truth of how little they knew cut the meeting short. Kenneth offered to send one of his best agents to assist Nick’s mother but Nick turned him down. ‘She’ll probably kill him before he gets close enough to explain,’ Nick reasoned.

 

‘Very well.’ Kenneth nodded once, offered a genuine smile to Rosalee and then moved for the door of the shop, the King only steps beside him.

 

‘We will be in touch,’ he said rather ominously before he left.

 

He hadn’t been in touch, had in fact, been rather quiet. Kenneth had checked in once but for all the resources at their disposal the Royals had only been able to come up with evidence confirming HW’s role in the Resistance’s destruction and even that had simply led to the body of the woman they had tentatively identified as the recruiter.

 

Nick hadn’t wanted to ask about the symbol calling to Grimms or the deaths of Dobrini or Fuentes. He’d leave the mystical things for when Renard’s mother came to town.

 

Still, the fact that their own searches had turned up nothing, that Nick’s mom had been unable to do more than follow Bonaparte to a hotel (where she lost him – three times) and the Royals had nothing useful to give was what inspired Adalind to suggest they suck it up and go meet with Meisner at HW. Not to be confused with meeting Meisner on HW’s terms. They’d been very clear on that when Trubel had called Meisner to arrange for their visit. They wanted to stress that the visit was not them agreeing to work for or even with HW just a chance to share a few resources and perhaps bring down Black Claw once and for all.

 

For Trubel, the lines were a little blurred but she’d been leaning more and more toward cutting ties with HW since she’d declared (in front of Meisner) where her allegiance truly lay. For now, it was a case of maintaining those ties with HW just so they still had some (minimal) leverage with which to get their feet in the door. Nick didn’t particularly care about keeping in good with Chavez as far as he was concerned any good she did working for the FBI had been permanently undermined when she kidnapped Trubel off the street.

 

The jury was still out on Meisner. The man seemed genuine in his desire to help take down Black Claw and although he’d offered again for Nick to join HW, he hadn’t pushed and for that Nick was more willing to trust him. Just not quite willing enough yet.

 

The deeper Trubel directed him into the woods the less trusting he was feeling.

 

‘Through there,’ Trubel instructed pointing out a dark tunnel amongst the trees that Nick would have missed if she hadn’t pointed it out.

 

Nick did as he was instructed, guiding his Land Cruiser into what looked like an oversized storm drain. The concrete sides of the tunnel didn’t look damp and there were dim safety lights in strips along the sides but their pale green glow didn’t stop the place from being creepy. Adalind had a dubious look on her face and they exchanged a look before Nick returned his attention to what was unmistakeably the entrance to a super-secret government facility. From a comic book.

 

‘I think it used to be some sort of Army barracks or something,’ Trubel muttered. ‘Or maybe that was the one in China? Maybe it was a weapons storage facility?’

 

‘Either way,’ Adalind muttered, ‘it’s appropriately creepy. Driving in here you expect to be locked up and never seen again. Should we have written letters to our loved ones in case we’re never seen again?’

 

‘Have you always been this dramatic?’ Trubel inquired.

 

‘Yes,’ Nick replied.

 

‘Oh, shut up,’ Adalind huffed. ‘Oh joy, we’re out of tunnel.’

 

Nick brought the car to a stop in front of a set of familiar looking doors. He wasn’t surprised to see reinforced doors blocking access to the inner workings of HW. The camera set in the corner of the tunnel above the doors told him they were being watched. They’d likely been on camera since they started the drive deeper into the woods. Nick hadn’t seen any cameras while they were still surrounded by trees but he had no doubt they were there. Sneaking up on HW would require patience and a long, circuitous walk. Anyone who knew HW was hidden away within the woods probably knew how difficult it would be and decided their time was better spent elsewhere.

 

Nick might have wished his time was better spent elsewhere but they needed answers and they’d already explored every other avenue available to them. If they wanted answers about Conrad Bonaparte, then HW was there last hope. If kidnapping Chavez was a bad idea, then kidnapping Bonaparte to force answers out of him was suicidal at best.

 

Sadly, it was their next option so Nick was really banking on HW having found something they hadn’t.

 

‘How long do we wait?’ Adalind wanted to know. She was leaning forward as best she could in her seat to glare at the camera.

 

‘Not long,’ Trubel assured her. ‘They’ll send us an escort.’

 

‘An escort?’ The idea tickled Adalind’s sense of humour, the implication they were dangerous enough to warrant an escort. ‘I thought _you_ were our escort?’

 

Trubel shrugged, unperturbed when she admitted, ‘Pretty sure they don’t trust me anymore.’

 

‘I thought Meisner did?’ Nick glanced back over his shoulder at her. ‘It didn’t seem like he held it against you that you shot him full of wesen sedative.’

 

‘I know, right?’ Trubel grinned. ‘I think he almost respects me more for doing that. No, it’s Chavez who doesn’t trust me anymore.’

 

‘I’m surprised she ever did,’ Nick mused. ‘They had to kidnap you to get your attention.’

 

‘Funnily enough that never comes up.’

 

In front of the car, the doors started to slide back revealing the backlit figures of two men. When Nick’s eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light he realised the two men were guards. Vests in place, M16s held firm and cool expressions on their faces. Nick was unimpressed by the firepower and the obvious show of force. The guards were clearly unimpressed with the task of shadowing a Grimm and his wife deeper into the facility. They seemed especially unimpressed with having to escort Trubel through as well. Nick wondered if that meant they trusted Trubel and didn’t see the point in the duty or if they viewed her as something like a traitor.

 

Still in the driver’s seat Nick couldn’t tell if the men were wesen or not.

 

‘I guess we’re walking from here?’ Nick eyed the men and then turned to Trubel for a response. She nodded and after steeling himself for the upcoming irritation (and likely disappointment), Nick pushed open the car door and stepped out into the tunnel. On the other side of the car, Adalind did the same. Nick hadn’t need to ask, Trubel slid out of the car behind Adalind, offering that little bit of added protection that Adalind probably didn’t need but that made both Nick and Trubel feel better about the situation.

 

‘They’re not going to ask him to surrender his weapon, are they?’ Adalind hissed at Trubel.

 

‘Nah,’ Trubel shook her head. ‘What’s the point? They know what he’s capable of without it.’

 

‘Well at least they’re not stupid.’

 

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

 

He met Adalind and Trubel at the front of the car and then Nick stepped forward to take the lead, Adalind falling in step beside him while Trubel followed just a few steps behind. The only sign the guards made to acknowledge them was a tight nod and a grunt that Nick took to mean “follow me”. The two men separated, one falling in behind to stop them from wandering off while the other led the way deeper into the facility, passing them through five different, securely locked doors.

 

It felt like overkill. It felt like HW was putting on a show as though they were trying to prove how super-secret and powerful they were. As though Nick would be impressed by the high-tech security that included not only card readers on all the doors but fingerprint and iris scanners as well – for some doors. It made no difference to Nick. He didn’t much care if they were trying to impress him. He planned to be in and out with minimal fuss but maximum gain. All he wanted was a few answers and a quick exit.

 

It was a pity he had to deal with Chavez first.


	38. Chapter 35

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 35**

Chavez was waiting for them when they cleared the final door. It would be easy to mistake the way she was standing in the hallway, fiddling with her phone, as lurking, waiting to pounce. As someone quite high up in HW and a respected FBI agent that sort of behaviour was beneath her.

 

And she could pretend that was the case all she wanted but she wasn’t fooling him and Adalind didn’t even pretend to be impressed. ‘You know, I think this is exactly how the last agent you sent after us died,’ she observed. ‘Wasn’t he lurking in a corridor waiting to jump us, Nick?’

 

Nick nodded. ‘The bald guy, with the red beard?’ he played along.

 

‘Oh, hey, I was wondering what happened to Carver.’ Trubel nodded as if that explained it all.

 

‘Carver?’ Adalind asked. ‘Was that his name? I never bothered to ask, throwing him into traffic just seemed easier.’

 

‘You threw him into traffic?’ Trubel sounded genuinely curious and it was only because he knew her so well that Nick could tell how much she was enjoying playing with Chavez.

 

‘Out of a window,’ Adalind corrected. ‘There just happened to be a truck passing.’

 

‘Ouch.’

 

‘It wasn’t exactly pretty,’ Nick acknowledged. ‘They wrote him off as a jumper, though. No nasty paperwork.’

 

‘Are you done?’ Chavez asked coldly.

 

‘For now,’ Adalind said with a smile that promised later would be worse. Much worse.

 

‘This way.’ Chavez turned her back on them, ostensibly to prove she didn’t feel threatened by them and Nick exchanged a wry look with Adalind before they followed after her, down the last corridor with their escorts trailing after them.

 

The room she led them into was a big open room with one wall taken up by a large screen and a number of smaller ones. A few desks were placed in front of the screens with small terminals, only two of which were occupied by HW agents. Both of them were dressed in black and wearing serious expressions as they worked. Whatever they were looking at on their screens didn’t seem to be pleasing them. Essentially, the room looked like a higher tech version of the bullpen at the station.

 

Despite their purported work holding back Black Claw, Nick couldn’t help feeling that the money spent on making HW pretty and filled with the latest tech, could have been better put to use in the police station. Nick suspected Wu would love to get his hands on some of the tech in that room. Nick could have done without it. At work and HW, as here in the inner lair of Black Claw’s apparent enemy Nick couldn’t help feeling like it was being wasted.

 

Meisner stood in the middle of the room staring at the large screen, studying the data there. He turned to greet them when they came in and Nick was disappointed when Chavez moved to stand beside him and didn’t leave the room. It felt a little childish to complain about her and how they didn’t trust her when she was right there in the room.

 

Not that it would stop them. Chavez owed them some answers and an explanation (or four), it was probably best she stayed. Confronting her with Meisner in the room might mean getting the real answers and not just some glossed over bullshit, the kind politicians were so good at dishing out. Putting herself beside Meisner sent a clear picture. She was saying they were a team, they were working together. It was as though Chavez was trying to prove they were meeting with Nick and Adalind as a united front.

 

Nick wasn’t buying it. He might not know Meisner well, he might not be sure he could trust him, but everything he knew about the man from Renard and Adalind (and even Trubel) said he was not happy with Chavez and he wasn’t afraid to show it. Standing in the office his displeasure was little more than a raised eyebrow when she made to stand beside him but Nick still caught it.

 

It was why he started off the meeting by talking about Hank and not Black Claw and Bonaparte. Learning the reason behind Hank’s poisoning was important to him but it would also set Chavez on edge and Nick was happy to do that. He asked the question of Meisner but his eyes never left Chavez’s.

 

‘Have you found out why Hank was poisoned?’

 

‘It was an unintentional side-effect that was put to use,’ Meisner answered, not questioning why he’d chosen to start with this topic or why Nick was being so abrupt. Nick was under the impression Meisner didn’t have much patience for small talk and as he and Adalind wanted to spend as little time as possible in HW’s super-secret lair, cutting out the small talk worked in their favour.

 

‘Side-effect of what?’ Trubel asked.

 

‘Of trying to create a Grimm without the ancestry,’ Chavez answered sharply.

 

‘What?’ Nick asked with surprise and he wasn’t the only one. Both Adalind and Trubel had spoken with him. ‘That’s what you were doing to Hank? Trying to make him a Grimm?’

 

Chavez glanced at Meisner but the man’s expression didn’t change offering her no out. ‘Yes. As someone who deals with wesen on a regular basis but can’t see them unless they want to be seen he was an ideal candidate. He would have known what he was seeing, he would have been prepared for it.’

 

‘That doesn’t make it okay,’ Nick growled. ‘The poison?’

 

‘Created an emotional response we needed to try and trigger the ability.’

 

‘You already triggered Josh’s abilities,’ Adalind pointed out. ‘You know that worked. Why even bother trying it on someone without Grimm blood? Surely you have enough Grimms stupid enough to work for you?’

 

Neither Chavez nor Meisner liked the suggestions that working for them was a decision only idiots made. Trubel couldn’t take offence, she hadn’t chosen to work for HW, she’d been coerced into it and was now struggling to find a way out – hopefully Meisner would be able to help there. Assuming his disappointment when he’d realised how Chavez had gotten to Trubel was real.

 

Which raised the question of just how a group of wesen got a bunch of Grimms working for them in the first place. The Trubel who had first arrived in Portland wouldn’t have let Chavez speak long enough after she woged to learn what she had to say. She certainly wouldn’t have agreed to work for a wesen. From the stories he’d heard about his ancestors and other Grimms, he didn’t think the others would be any different. Had HW resorted to kidnapping all of them too? Not that it would surprise him but what had kept them from killing their way out once they’d heard enough?

 

Trubel had stayed because they’d threatened to arrest her for murder, tried to take him down too. That was how they’d got her in but afterward she’d stayed to protect Josh as best she could until Black Claw had begun to seem like a real threat and then, instead of towing the party line, she’d broken away from HW (again, as best she could) and come looking for Nick. It spoke to Trubel’s trust in him and his friends over HW even with all of their connections, money and shiny new tech.

 

‘Imagine if we could create our own?’ Chavez sounded coldly practical, which was disappointing because Nick was expecting a fanatical tinge to her words. He could have understood her (not liked her, but understood) if this was an experiment for her, the realisation of a life’s work but to simply be doing it because it was possible, because, in theory, she could? That kind of cold and clinical practicality spoke volumes about the kind of person Chavez was. If she was comfortable experimenting on ordinary people with no real ties to the wesen world what else was she capable of?

 

‘Imagine a team of Grimms, trained to work with wesen without the prejudice of centuries of ancestral conditioning,’ Chavez elaborated. ‘Imagine how that could help us fight Black Claw’s threat.’

 

‘You were trying to create an army of Nicks?’ Adalind seemed bemused by the idea. ‘I think you’re supposed to be flattered,’ she told him. ‘I’m allowed to be creeped out, right?’

 

Trubel nodded, looking just as creeped out as Adalind claimed to be. Meisner’s expression had shut down, he was giving nothing away. He’d claimed not to know what Chavez was up to and Nick couldn’t tell if that was true now. His look was giving nothing away though the fact it now looked like it could cut through steel did suggest he was unimpressed with Chavez’s conduct but unwilling to openly show it. If they had any hope of getting Nick to work for them (never going to happen) or even with them (still not happening) then they needed to maintain that united front.

 

At least until killing Chavez worked better for that purpose.

 

‘I’m not flattered,’ Nick deadpanned. ‘There are laws against this kind of experimentation,’ he pointed out, though he wasn’t sure why he bothered. As an FBI agent, Chavez had been perfectly content to kidnap Trubel, threaten her and to experiment on Josh when he’d point blank refused to cooperate. Why he thought the idea of violating basic human rights would bring her up short he didn’t know.

 

‘Can we just talk about Black Claw, now?’ Adalind asked. ‘The idea of you having an entire team of Nick is messing with my head. Also, I need to pee, so if we could just move this right along…’

 

‘There’s a bathroom down the corridor,’ Meisner spoke into the awkward silence that followed. ‘Trubel can escort you.’

 

Trubel nodded. It seemed Meisner still had some trust left in Trubel. Which would absolutely be ruined when they realised that while Adalind probably did have to pee (there really wasn’t much room for unimportant things like organs this close to her due date) what she’d really been after was a chance to get at other parts of HW without Meisner or Chavez prying. Trubel led Adalind away to do some quick recon and Nick stayed with Meisner and Chavez, a stony expression on his face.

 

‘What do you know about Bonaparte?’

 

On this, they were at least all agreed. Meisner turned to the screen again, directing one of the men at a nearby desk to bring up a file. The image of the man from the auction filled the screen. Even in such a large size it was difficult to imagine the man could intimidate someone as powerful as Henrietta. Though Nick had seen plenty of things since becoming a Grimm (and some as an ordinary cop) that told him size and looks could be deceiving.

 

Just look at Adalind, a tiny little blonde lawyer package who could throw a punch, toss you through a wall and spell you six ways from Sunday.

 

And he’d reached the point where he found that sexy. Okay, he’d always found that sexy but now he was in a position to appreciate it because that tiny little fierce blonde was his wife. Even heavily pregnant with his child she still wasn’t someone to be messed with and that filled him with all kinds of warm feelings.

 

‘We’ve been able to confirm his identity,’ Meisner informed him. ‘The information Interpol had was largely correct. Bonaparte is Iranian born, his mother is Iranian though his father is from France originally. Bonaparte lived the majority of his life in Switzerland and Germany with the occasional year here and there in Austria. What Interpol didn’t get was that he was born in 1932.’

 

‘1932,’ Nick repeated. ‘Seriously?’

 

Meisner nodded. ‘Apparently, he’s had some work done.’

 

Anyone else and Nick might have appreciated the dry way Meisner delivered that information. ‘What about this secret society?’

 

‘We found references in his early years to a number of colleges and societies but nothing that we could tie to Black Claw. We did find two business ties to the other name you gave us but nothing tying those back to Black Claw either.’ Meisner motioned to the man at the desk and suddenly there were nine other photos sharing the screen with Bonaparte’s. Six men, three women, all of whom looked like they came from money, all of them looking to be between forty and sixty, though Nick wasn’t sure now what to think of that. ‘These nine have regular dealings with Bonaparte, they’re all wesen and though we haven’t found anything to tie them to Black Claw they were the most likely based on what we know about Black Claw’s operations and the information you gave us about the secret society.’

 

‘Who are they?’ Nick studied each face but he didn’t recognise any of them.

 

‘From the left, Maxwell Troy, Samira Ruben, Quentin Deveraux, Amelia Halliday, Mikael – no known surname – Alfredo Gutiérrez, Ferdinand Odensson, Felipe van der Hann and Joslyn Mandelson,’ Meisner read off. ‘Each of them come from a wealthy family, all old money with families that can be traced back three centuries. They have hands in real estate, shipping, construction – Halliday has a small company that cleans up after environmental disasters – they’re investors, well-educated strong families and all hexenbiests or zauberbiests, with the exception of Mandelson who we haven’t been able to classify.’

 

‘These are the men and women behind Black Claw?’

 

‘We believe so, yes,’ Meisner confirmed. ‘We have people watching each of them but so far none of them have shown any link to Black Claw or any relationship with Bonaparte beyond their business dealings.’

 

‘Do they only have dealings with Bonaparte or each other as well?’

 

‘Each other,’ Chavez answered before Meisner could. She seemed to think Nick was stupid for even thinking to ask it but he didn’t rise to her snide bait. ‘The intel we gathered has shown each of them at one time or another has used information they could only have gotten from someone else here on screen to secure a business deal.’

 

‘I also suspect Halliday and Ruben were involved romantically between 1996 and 2001,’ Meisner added. ‘Also, potentially with Bonaparte during the late 1980’s.’

 

‘Both of them?’ Nick frowned.

 

‘There seems to have been some overlap,’ Meisner confirmed.

 

Nick studied the people on screen, trying to learn as much about each of them as he could without knowing more than their names. Each of them held the same power that came with having money and knowing how to wield it to get exactly what they wanted. Knowing they were all likely powerful hexenbiests and zauberbiests just reinforced that effect. Looking at them, he imagined each one was as ruthless as Catherine Schade had been, doing everything and anything to get power or in this case to keep that power and expand it. There was no question that a group of well-connected hexenbiests could create something as devastating as Black Claw. The question Nick was struggling with was why?

 

This group had power already and while he could understand that certain types of people could never have enough power, creating Black Claw and pitting wesen against the world seemed needlessly messy. Maybe it was just the type of people he was friends with but all the wesen he knew felt like coming out into the open and exposing their true nature was a bad idea. It was hardly fun always hiding what you were but it beat the constant fear of what would happen if the world at large knew the truth. Wesen were severely outnumbered and though they were individually stronger, Nick could see exposure turning out mobs and creating riots.

 

How was chaos preferable to sitting comfortable back and enjoying all the wealth they’d accumulated? It just didn’t make sense to Nick. It didn’t seem to make sense to Meisner either but Chavez didn’t seem as interested in the why only that it was happening and they needed to stop it. At least they were finally closer to making that happen if Meisner was right and these men and women were members of the secret society Henrietta remembered. He’d have to show her the faces and the names, see if they jogged her memory. He’d also have to run them by Renard’s mother when she arrived and Kenneth as well.

 

‘One of them must be funding Black Claw,’ Nick reasoned. ‘This kind of thing takes money and money can be traced.’

 

Meisner nodded (Chavez looked like she was refraining from rolling her eyes). ‘We stopped an attack two days ago on the Wesen Council when we intercepted a shipment of weapons coming through port. If we can trace who ordered them, who paid to have them shipped then hopefully we can follow that back to one of these people.’

 

Nick studied the faces on screen one last time. ‘I need copies of everything you have.’ He didn’t ask, it wasn’t a request. If Meisner wanted his help, then he was going to give Nick everything he wanted.

 

Meisner nodded and after a quick exchange with the man at the desk, handed Nick a flash drive. ‘Everything we know about Black Claw is on here.’

 

‘Everything?’ Nick didn’t hold his disbelief back.

 

‘Everything,’ Meisner confirmed.

 

‘Oh, good,’ Adalind said, appearing back in the room with Trubel. ‘Does that mean we’re done here?’

 

‘Yes,’ Nick told her, not bothering to check with Meisner and definitely without waiting for Chavez. ‘Let’s go.’

 

‘Trubel,’ Chavez barked her name in a clear command for the younger Grimm stay.

 

Trubel ignored her.

 

They only had the one escort on the way back out, apparently Meisner had deemed them less of a threat going back out, and soon they were back in the safety of Nick’s car quickly putting HW behind them. They didn’t speak until they were clear of the woods and any possible surveillance. Even then, only once Nick had pulled over and he and Trubel had been over his car carefully looking for any bugs HW may have planted while they’d been inside. They find a GPS tracker and a small listening device inside, both of which Nick destroyed under his heel before tossing the remains carelessly into the road to be further destroyed by any passers-by – or retrieved by HW.

 

‘Find out anything good?’ Adalind asked once they were back on their way – to the Spice Shop, not home, even though Nick was sure no one was following them.

 

Nick held out the flash drive. ‘Identities on the members of that secret society – potential members anyway but I’d say Meisner was on to something. Apparently, he loaded everything they have on Black Claw onto this thing.’

 

‘Everything?’

 

‘That’s what he said.’ Nick pocketed the flash drive again. ‘What about you?’

 

Adalind pulled a face. ‘Well the bathrooms are clean. We got to see that Chavez is holding two people for her experiments – one is definitely not a Grimm but the air tasted like poison so I’m guessing they picked some poor guy off the street and are trying to make another Grimm. The other one – I think he might have been a zauberbiest but now he’s kind of a zombie.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘A zombie,’ Trubel repeated.

 

‘Not like you when you go into your cold rage – which I should probably look into fixing – but Trubel could have stabbed him and he wouldn’t have noticed. He was standing in the middle of his cell – all straight backed like a soldier – and staring at the door. He didn’t even blink when I opened it and I’m not sure he even knew we were there. It was like he was catatonic.’

 

‘That’s,’ Nick searched for a word to accurately describe what she was saying and had to settle for, ‘weird.’

 

‘That’s certainly one word for it.’

 

‘If they really gave you everything they know, then I’m done,’ Trubel told him. ‘That place was always a bit creepy but I’m not about to let them experiment on me.’

 

‘I think that’s only Chavez,’ Adalind reasoned. ‘I honestly don’t think Meisner would do that.’

 

‘I’m not so sure,’ Nick disagreed. ‘I don’t think he knew Chavez was experimenting on Hank but I bet he knows exactly what’s happening in those cells.’

 

‘Well it’s not happening any more,’ Trubel told him. ‘Which is another reason why I should probably not go back.’

 

Nick caught her eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘What did you do?’

 

‘We let the crazy one out and left the zauberbiest’s cell unlocked.’

 

Nick thought about the implications of that for a moment and then shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’

 

They were quiet during the rest of the drive, each lost in their own thoughts. Nick was thinking about the apparent members of Black Claw and how they could use their identities to bring Black Claw down. He didn’t think it would be so simple as to just kill them. Could it? Was this one of those times where killing the people in charge would have it all falling apart or was it more like beheading a hydra and watching twice as many heads grow back?

 

He supposed, what it really came down to, was the money. If they could follow the money, cut off the funding and then cut off the head, so to speak, then Black Claw would be nothing more than a bunch of angry wesen demanding power they didn’t deserve. Nick was pretty well-versed in dealing with angry wesen and he’d certainly dealt with enough power-hungry wesen with the Royals. He thought they could handle the fallout if they managed to destroy the power behind Black Claw.

 

Which was about the simplest and most complicated plan, but it was a plan. Follow the money, shut it down, kill and/or incapacitate the power behind Black Claw, deal with the fall out. It could work. He hoped it did work because it seemed a rather simple plan though, as with any plan, there was plenty of room for failure – hence the potentially complicated.

 

Rosalee and Monroe weren’t the only ones waiting for them at the Spice Shop. Hank and Wu were there as was Renard and a good looking blonde woman. ‘My mother, Elizabeth,’ Renard introduced and Nick’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

 

‘I look good for my age,’ she smiled.

 

Renard ruined her words by adding, ‘She’s had some work done,’ and unintentionally mirroring Meisner’s earlier words. ‘Henrietta is on her way.’

 

‘Good,’ Nick said. He held the flash drive out for Wu who was the most likely to get everything they needed off it. ‘This is apparently everything HW has on Black Claw. There are nine names on there of potential secret society members.’

 

‘I’m not sure how much help I’ll be,’ Elizabeth apologised. ‘I haven’t had much to do with this group since my parents died. I chose to find my power elsewhere.’

 

‘Sleeping with the King?’ Adalind offered, with surprisingly little judgement. Nick supposed, she’d seen worse from her own mother. Hell, Adalind herself had done much the same thing. She didn’t like that she’d done it, looking back, but she wasn’t ashamed of the steps she’d taken, especially not when they’d led her to where she was now.

 

‘Sleeping with a Grimm?’ Elizabeth countered, also without judgement but with a knowing smile.

 

Adalind shrugged. ‘We all do stupid things for love.’

 

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed, her words filled with meaning, ‘we do.’

 

Wu pulled out a laptop and plugged the flash drive in and they all crowded around him to look at its contents. The drive wasn’t encrypted which Nick had half been expecting and he pointed to the file that was clearly labelled as containing possible members of the secret society. The same nine faces appeared on screen for everyone to study and Nick looked to Elizabeth to see if he could read anything from her expression.

 

She was studying the people intently, trying to place them in her memory. Eventually she reached out a hand and pointed to van der Hann. ‘My mother had an affair with him.’ She pointed to Gutiérrez. ‘And him.’

 

Renard sighed. ‘I’m not surprised.’

 

‘Do all hexenbiest just sleep their way to power?’ Rosalee asked. ‘No offense,’ she added when she saw Adalind looking at her.

 

Adalind shrugged. ‘None taken. If I hadn’t been sleeping with Sean I never would have met Nick.’

 

Nick happened to be looking at Renard when she spoke and so he got a nice long look at the face Renard pulled at her words. Renard might not like Adalind much but he definitely didn’t like the implication that he was responsible for her current happiness. Especially when that happiness was doing a better job of being a father to his own daughter – which to be honest, wasn’t all that hard or even really Nick’s fault.

 

‘That was not my intention when I ordered you to kill Marie Kessler.’

 

‘Worked out well, though,’ Adalind countered cheerfully. ‘Of course, if I could, I would absolutely go back and tell you to go to hell.’

 

‘But then, as you pointed out, you wouldn’t be here.’

 

‘No,’ Adalind contradicted confidently. ‘I’d have won Nick over during the case when he had to protect me. He already thought I was hot.’

 

Renard looked disgusted but his gaze still flitted to Nick as though for confirmation. Nick shrugged but Hank laughed, ‘Oh, man, I’d forgotten about that. We were standing outside that jewellery store and you were staring at her.’

 

‘She was my first woge,’ Nick said defensively.

 

‘You were my first Grimm.’

 

‘Aren’t they just adorable?’ Henrietta commented, appearing behind them as if out of nowhere. Nick hadn’t heard the door and he definitely hadn’t heard the bell. Was that thing even still attached?

 

‘Yes, they are,’ Elizabeth agreed, smiling to her old friend. ‘It’s been too long.’

 

‘Nine? Ten years?’ Henrietta guessed. ‘It’s good to see you Elizabeth.’

 

Nick didn’t know that he liked being considered adorable but he was sure he didn’t want to start something with two powerful hexenbiests – not when he wanted their help anyway. ‘Do you recognise any of these people?’ he asked Henrietta.

 

She studied the photos on screen for a moment, carefully taking in the features of each as she dug through her memories for anything helpful. ‘Can you enlarge that one?’ she asked Wu, pointing to the picture of van der Hann. ‘Didn’t your mother have an affair with him?’

 

Monroe snorted. Nick was taking this as a positive sign, though. ‘You recognise him, then? As one of the members of this secret society?’

 

‘I can’t say for sure if they’re members of that but I do know this one was around a bit when I was younger. Where did you get these people from?’

 

‘HW put together a list of business associates of Bonaparte’s that fit with what they know of Black Claw,’ Nick explained. ‘I’m hoping one or more of these wesen will be able to lead us to the money. I think it’s safe to assume that without financial support this so-called revolution will fall apart.’

 

‘You think that if we can stop this group then the rest will simply crumble?’ Renard posited.

 

‘I think we can handle a few pockets of resistance,’ Nick replied. ‘I think if we can stop Bonaparte and his associates then we stand a good chance of bringing Black Claw down.’

 

‘I agree,’ Rosalee put in. ‘From what we’ve been able to gather this whole Black Claw thing started with Bonaparte. Something had to push wesen into stepping up and fighting like this – it had to be him. They were never this organised before.’

 

‘They’re certainly better funded than the Resistance,’ Elizabeth agreed.

 

‘They’d have to be,’ Nick pointed out. ‘The Royals are a much smaller group to rebel against.’

 

‘But they’re not really rebelling, are they?’ Rosalee frowned down at the photos. ‘I know HW says they’re a huge threat but we still haven’t seen anything to suggest that’s the case. Here in Portland we can only really tie them to Dobrini’s murder – and Fuentes’, sort of.’

 

‘The Council didn’t know anything about Black Claw until we started asking about it,’ Monroe added.

 

Hank nodded. ‘Didn’t you say they found a couple of moles?’

 

‘Yes.’ Nick frowned, tilting his head as he considered the facts as they knew them. ‘It’s all been intelligence gathering. If it weren’t for HW, Black Claw wouldn’t even be on our radar. We wouldn’t have any idea what the claw mark calling card meant.’

 

‘It all comes back to HW, doesn’t it?’ Adalind realised. ‘Everything we know we’ve learned from Black Claw.’

 

Trubel was frowning, apparently looking at all of her experiences in a new light now. ‘Most of the people I tracked down, most of the jobs I was given for HW were information gathering – sometimes I killed wesen but that was only if I got in their way or they got in mine. I gathered the information and brought it back, I think I’ve stopped an attack maybe twice? Both of those were in Europe, in Munich, actually. HW made them out to be pieces of a larger problem.’

 

‘Maybe they were,’ Renard picked up where Trubel left off, ‘but maybe this is bigger than we realise.’

 

‘No,’ Rosalee said slowly as if finally, all of the pieces had slid into place. ‘No, it’s not bigger than we realise, its smaller.’

 

‘What do you mean?’ Wu asked, voicing the question on the tip of all their tongues. ‘How can it be smaller?’

 

Before Rosalee could answer, the door to the shop opened, this time the bell chimed and they all turned to look as Kenneth stepped inside. ‘What have I missed?’ he asked, eyes darting over everyone and lingering a moment too long over Elizabeth before coming to rest on the laptop they were all gathered around.

 

‘Members of the secret society we think is behind Black Claw,’ Nick explained. ‘Rosalee was just telling us we’ve got it wrong, she thinks this whole thing is smaller than we’ve been led to believe.’

 

‘She’s right,’ he agreed, stepping forward to look at the photos on the screen, pointing at the image of Joslyn Mandelson. ‘That woman founded Hadrian’s Wall.’


	39. Chapter 36

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plan to take down Black Claw starts to take shape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can feel the end drawing near, it's a little daunting but things are really starting to pick up now. Thanks for the kudos!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 36**

It wasn’t that knowing Black Claw and Hadrian’s Wall were being controlled by the same group suddenly gave them a plan of action, it was just that realising the two were so deeply connected made it a little easier to put together a plan as they weren’t worried about HW finding out and stepping on their toes. They were just worried about HW finding out and joining Black Claw to stop them.

 

Kenneth studied the list of names and their photographs, before handing Wu another flash drive. ‘This is all the information we were able to gather on HW. Mandelson is her maiden name, she’s married to Adrian Grant – a little known member of the Intelligence Committee who dealt mostly with Homeland Security until six years ago, when his wife approached him about starting up an entirely new intelligence division to deal with any wesen threats. She supplied the money, he provided the government credentials. I think you’ll find that many of the money transfers that HW found and attributed to Black Claw can, in fact, be attributed to Hadrian’s Wall.’

 

‘Great,’ Trubel muttered. ‘This whole time, I’ve been forced to work for the bad guys.’

 

‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ Kenneth told her, unintentionally providing a small measure of comfort that Nick could see unsettled Trubel more than the thought of working for Black Claw disguised as HW.

 

‘What’s the point, though?’ Rosalee asked. ‘Why create a group set on outing wesen and destroying the status quo and another supposed to fight that and stop it?’

 

‘Money,’ Kenneth, Henrietta and Nick all answered at the same time Adalind, Elizabeth and Renard replied, ‘Power.’

 

‘This uprising is a gamble,’ Kenneth further explained. ‘By pitting both groups against each other you ensure that no matter which side wins, you gain power and money. From the little information, we could gather, it seems this mysterious group is content to sit back and watch Black Claw and HW fight each other. Bonaparte is merely the face of the movement while Mendelson can keep clear of her own involvement by using her husband’s name as a shield.’

 

‘Does that mean they want Black Claw to succeed?’ Trubel asked.

 

‘I don’t think it matters.’ Adalind considered her words before she added, ‘Black Claw needed a face to properly gain a following, I’m guessing that’s why Bonaparte showed himself at the auction and probably at smaller, other Black Claw rallies. That doesn’t mean they need the uprising to succeed, swooping in and controlling the clean-up could be almost as effective.’

 

Rosalee turned her attention to Kenneth and the hexenbiests in the room. ‘If we stop the group behind Black Claw and HW will that stop the uprising?’

 

‘If we can take away the power this group is getting from this mess, then yes,’ Elizabeth answered. ‘We should ask around some more, dig a little deeper but I think it’s safe to assume that once the power and money behind the movement disappears then it will fall apart.’

 

‘The group will have too tight a leash on their followers,’ Henrietta added. ‘It wouldn’t do to let it gain too much momentum outside of their control.’

 

Renard nodded. ‘It’s a business venture, they’ll have a way to stop the uprising and settle back into their usual businesses without losing too much. This is an experiment to them.’

 

‘So, we, what?’ Trubel asked. ‘Kill this group, take advantage of the fallout to disband HW and hope that Black Claw falls apart?’

 

‘Yes,’ Nick nodded. ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’

 

Of course, just because, as plans went, it was pretty simple, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a pain to put into action. They spent hours in the Spice Shop going over everything they knew about the members of this secret group and devising ways to bring them down. The simplest way to do it was to just kill them but as much as Nick’s conscience wasn’t against the idea it did run the risk of looking suspicious and making loved ones angry and set on retribution. They could deal with suspicions but the angry and potentially vengeful loved ones might cause a problem – especially if they had any influence or control over the group.

 

‘We need evidence,’ Monroe pointed out.

 

‘Something concrete we can give to the wesen council and those at HW who didn’t know what they’d gotten themselves into,’ Wu picked up on his train of thought.

 

‘We use Bud,’ Adalind suggested, ‘and the Spice Shop. Once we have that evidence we can start spreading the story like gossip. Nobody likes being used, if we can make people believe that this group was using them to further their own agenda then it should fall apart on its own.’

 

‘Assuming there aren’t any people highly placed in both Black Claw and HW who like what they have and have enough influence to keep hold of everyone,’ Elizabeth poked a small hole in their theory.

 

‘Assuming that,’ Adalind acknowledged. ‘We still don’t know enough about the structure of Black Claw.’

 

‘So, we start with HW?’ Trubel suggested.

 

Nick shook his head, if they started with HW, if they took down the group they did understand then it gave Black Claw and the mysterious group overseeing them the chance they needed to make their move. ‘We need to hit them all at once,’ Nick realised.

 

‘A coordinated strike to eliminate each member of this group and any potential lieutenants with enough power and influence to take their place,’ Kenneth agreed.

 

‘Are we back to killing them?’ Hank asked and Nick was surprised to hear the lack of reproach in his partner’s voice. Given how much Hank had been struggling with the darker aspects of the wesen world, it seemed strange that he would suddenly be okay with killing at least ten, if not more, people.

 

‘I think we need to,’ Adalind answered before Nick could.

 

‘We need to steal their money first,’ Henrietta declared.

 

‘Isn’t that,’ Wu searched for the right word but all he could come up with was, ‘wrong?’

 

Nick looked at him in amusement. ‘We’re plotting to murder at least ten people and that’s what you draw the line at?’

 

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ he mumbled. ‘How do we steal their money though?’

 

‘HW can do that,’ Trubel admitted. ‘If we have the account numbers, we can temporarily freeze them, long enough to get their attention at least.’

 

‘No.’ Elizabeth shook her head. ‘Freezing their assets won’t help in the long run.’

 

‘My mother’s right,’ Renard agreed. ‘We need to drain all of the accounts to prevent anyone else from stepping up and using that money.’

 

‘Do we know anyone who could do that?’ Nick asked of the room. ‘Do we know anyone who could drain the accounts of everything?’

 

‘I have people for that,’ Kenneth assured them.

 

‘Okay great,’ Rosalee sighed before pointing out the flaw in their plan. ‘But what do we do with the money?’

 

‘Charitable donations,’ Kenneth said without missing a beat. ‘After a small fee is removed for our hard work,’ he elaborated when they all looked at him in surprise. ‘The Royal families have been hit just as badly as the rest of you – and I’m sure the take from the auction isn’t nearly enough to cover all of the renovations you had planned.’

 

‘It has the basics covered,’ Nick told him, not touching on how or why Kenneth knew that. The man had proved to be helpful in all of their exchanges so far and while Nick didn’t expect that to last, he also hadn’t felt as though his home and family were being threatened. It made for a nice change where the Royals were concerned.

 

‘I feel like I should take my badge off for this conversation,’ Wu announced suddenly, drawing attention to the fact that he was in fact wearing his uniform because he was technically on the clock.

 

There was a moment of silence in which Hank shifted uncomfortably and Nick accidentally caught Renard’s eye. He saw acknowledgement there, an understanding that, while Hank and Wu might be a little uncomfortable with what was being planned, Nick and Renard were far passed that point. Nick had buried so many bodies over the last couple of years, there wasn’t any reason to start feeling bad about it now.

 

‘You don’t have to be part of this,’ Nick offered, looking from Wu to Hank.

 

Wu scoffed. ‘How exactly do you think you’re going to pull this off without us?’ he asked. ‘We need to be in at least ten places at once.’

 

Nick hadn’t considered that. The group pulling the strings wasn’t exactly local either. As much as they talked about taking them down it was kind of a logistical nightmare to consider. Bonaparte might be in Portland (temporarily at least) and there was a good chance Mendelson was in the country but the others were likely to be in Europe and not necessarily together.

 

‘Hank and Wu can’t afford to vanish off grid for a couple of days,’ Renard reasoned. He looked to Nick, ‘You could disappear and we can write it off as paternity leave.’

 

Nick acknowledged his words with a nod, though the mention of paternity leave had him wanting to raise a curious brow. He hadn’t exactly had the chance to bring it up with Renard, his reluctance to address the fact of Adalind’s pregnancy with Renard meant that he’d been half hoping to play the whole thing off as sick leave at the last minute. Renard acknowledging his taking paternity leave was strange, good but strange.

 

‘And as powerful as Adalind is,’ Kenneth pointed out, ‘she’s too pregnant to travel and it’s a little risky to send her against another powerful hexenbiest.’

 

‘We use the Grimms HW has,’ Monroe suggested. ‘Once they find out who they’ve been working for this whole time I bet they’ll be looking to cut off a few heads.’

 

‘They will,’ Trubel assured them all. ‘I am.’

 

‘How many Grimms work for HW?’ Elizabeth asked.

 

‘Four,’ Trubel replied. ‘Five if you include me.’

 

‘Are we including Josh?’ Rosalee asked.

 

‘No,’ Nick and Trubel answered at the same time.

 

‘I’ll take one,’ Elizabeth volunteered.

 

‘Me too,’ Henrietta offered. ‘I’m done being afraid of Bonaparte.’

 

‘Wary,’ Elizabeth corrected. ‘You’re not afraid, just sensibly wary.’

 

Henrietta laughed a little at that. ‘I imagine your mother will happily take another,’ she added to Nick.

 

He nodded. ‘I’ll handle Bonaparte,’ Nick said. ‘I’m not leaving Portland with Adalind about to give birth.’

 

‘Assuming I take the last member of the group,’ Kenneth said, ‘that leaves us only with any potential followers looking to step up and take their place.’

 

‘Meisner will want to handle those,’ Adalind murmured. ‘I don’t believe he has any idea he’s working for the same group behind Black Claw.’

 

‘No,’ Renard agreed. ‘Meisner wouldn’t be working for them if he knew.’

 

‘Great,’ Monroe said. ‘We have a plan.’

 

‘It’s a terrible, half-formed plan,’ Wu added.

 

‘It’s a start,’ Nick acknowledged. ‘We still need locations on all the members, we need to know the kind of security they have and we need to know about any other threats that might be waiting for us.’

 

‘Finding the members won’t be hard,’ Kenneth admitted. ‘They’re prominent in their businesses, we can find them but learning enough about their habits to take them down might take while.’

 

‘How long do we have?’ Trubel asked. ‘It’s not like Black Claw or HW have been in much of a rush.’

 

‘No,’ Adalind acknowledged, ‘but we are. It would be nice to have this dealt with before our son is born.’

 

‘So, two weeks?’ Rosalee estimated. ‘Assuming you don’t go early, that’s not a lot of time.’

 

‘It’s better to have a set timeframe,’ Kenneth told them. ‘Two weeks will have to be enough.’

 

There was a moment of uneasy silence and then it seemed as though everyone remembered they had somewhere else they had to be. Henrietta requested they let her know who her target was to be before she begged off saying she had an appointment. Kenneth left with the promise to gather as much information as possible about the group and Elizabeth slipped out after him without bothering to give an explanation at all.

 

‘I need to go back to HW,’ Trubel said without any enthusiasm. ‘I need to talk to Meisner about this. We’re going to need his support.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘Call him, arrange a meeting but don’t go back. Who knows what happened after you two let those prisoners go.’

 

Adalind winced. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Maybe avoid the place from now on?’ she suggested. ‘It’s not like you want to be there anyway.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Trubel agreed. ‘But now I think I need to. We need to know who is working for HW because they believe in the cause and who is working for them because Black Claw needed them to. I’ll call you later.’

 

‘I have an appointment with the Mayor’s office,’ Renard announced, after Trubel had left. ‘Somebody took notice of our high closure rate and they’re threatening to make an example out of the department.’

 

‘High closure rate?’ Hank snorted. ‘They must not have read the files.’

 

‘No,’ Renard agreed. ‘But it’s politics, they don’t care if the reports make sense, only that someone has been caught or stopped.’

 

Once Renard was gone the atmosphere in the room lightened considerably. It wasn’t as though all of their troubles just vanished but the pressure of being constantly on guard was finally gone. While Nick would freely admit that Renard had taken this new, open communication thing between them well enough, the idea of actually being open and sharing information still left a funny taste in his mouth. Nick imagined Renard felt the same way and there were probably plenty of little secrets being kept still. It wasn’t like Nick didn’t have plenty of those of his own.

 

‘I need to contact the Council,’ Rosalee announced. ‘Whatever information they can give us on these people will be helpful.’

 

‘Anything at this point would be helpful,’ Hank grumbled. ‘I don’t like this. I don’t like that the best way to deal with this is to kill a group of people.’

 

‘You don’t have to be part of this,’ Nick told him, even though they really could use every available hand.

 

‘These people poisoned me,’ Hank reminded them unnecessarily. ‘I need to help.’

 

‘They were trying to make you a Grimm,’ Adalind explained, remembering the earlier conversation at HW. ‘The poison was apparently an unintended side-effect they made use of.’

 

Hank didn’t react for a moment, choosing to stare blankly at her as he processed the words. ‘They what?’ he managed eventually.

 

‘Were trying to make you a Grimm,’ Adalind repeated. ‘Obviously, it didn’t work.’

 

‘Why?’

 

‘They want to make an army of Nick-like Grimms,’ she explained. ‘They want a group of Grimms they can control, who don’t have the influence of centuries of wesen-hate.’

 

‘And they thought I’d be a great candidate?’ Hank didn’t sound angry, just resigned.

 

‘Apparently, the fact that you know what to expect from wesen is why they chose you,’ Nick murmured, thoughts not really on the conversation. He was already thinking about how he was supposed to take Bonaparte down when his mother couldn’t even track him beyond the hotel. All evidence suggested he wasn’t even staying there but he kept going back there and that was when she lost his trail.

 

Why did he keep going back? How was Nick supposed to catch up with him? How was he supposed to eliminate a zauberbiest that made Henrietta nervous? Henrietta, who Adalind had freely admitted was one of the most powerful hexenbiests she’d ever met. Of course, he’d heard on more than one occasion that he was one of the best Grimms but that just didn’t seem to hold as much weight. His mother had years more experience dealing with powerful wesen and she was having trouble, how was Nick supposed to deal with him?

 

‘Don’t overthink it,’ Adalind advised, seemingly reading his mind. ‘You always work so much better when you just run with it.’

 

‘Thank you?’ Nick wasn’t sure if he was supposed to find that complimentary or not. It sounded like she was insulting his planning skills but he’d made perfectly effective plans before. In which case, was he supposed to be offended? He shook his head. ‘We should get to work,’ he told Hank and Wu. ‘I’ll see you at home.’ He kissed Adalind and handed her the keys to his Land Cruiser. ‘Make sure my mother hasn’t killed Josh.’

 

‘I make no promises.’

 

There was a case waiting for them as soon as they entered the precinct. An officer handed Hank a slip of paper with an address and they turned around and walked right back out again without the chance to stop by their desks. Wu hadn’t even made it that far, having been called out on another call. Nick would have happily traded places with Wu – even if it meant spending the day back in uniform – when he and Hank arrived and they took in the scene.

 

‘Wesen?’ Hank asked.

 

‘Wesen,’ Nick agreed.

 

The address was to a small two-bedroom house that overlooked the river. It wasn’t far from Renard’s own home but lacked the fancy modern look that the houses around Renard’s home had. This was an older house, one Nick would assume was owned by people not willing to sell out to a developer looking to turn the surprisingly large block of land into a bunch of condos. Depending on how the next of kin felt, that might not be a problem any more.

 

The owners of the small house, middle-aged Martha and Louis Dent were now in dozens of pieces scattered across the backyard. At least Nick was assuming they were the owners. And that there was only two of them. All they could see, standing at the side of the house where the uniform had directed them round to the backyard, were chunks of bloody flesh that looked like they’d exploded over the yard. Pieces were hanging in trees, from the porch and the little hanging baskets that used to hold flowers but now held people pieces.

 

There was something that could have been part of a face – it definitely had an eye – looking at them from the water feature of a swan that formed the centre of the landscaped backyard. The chunk of flesh was draped over the beak of the swan and the eye dangled over the spout where water would flow if the fountain were on.

 

‘Could have been a wood chipper,’ Hank suggested without any real conviction.

 

‘No,’ Nick said, eyes drawn to the bloody slashes on the broken back door, ‘it was definitely wesen.’

 

Hank followed his gaze to the door where a woman in gloves and booties was carefully placing an evidence marker and photographing the bloody claws marks. ‘Black Claw did this?’

 

‘Looks like,’ Nick agreed. ‘I’m starting to think we don’t have two weeks.’

 

‘No,’ Hank agreed. ‘But we now have evidence. Lots of evidence.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed, looking around the backyard as though somehow this third look would suggest a place to start. ‘Maybe a little too much.’

 

‘I got fingers!’ one of the CSU guys called out supplying Nick and Hank with that place to start. They picked their way carefully across the backyard to the small man and watched on carefully as he photographed and logged the evidence before he picked up what looked like an index finger and two thumbs to scan through the fingerprint scanner.

 

‘Thumb and index belong to Martha Dent,’ he told them. ‘The other thumb…yeah, it’s her husband.’

 

‘Well, it’s a start,’ Hank muttered, taking another furtive look around. ‘This place is a mess, we’re not getting much of anything from this yet.’

 

‘No,’ Nick agreed. ‘Is the inside clean?’ he asked the tech from CSU.

 

He nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re good to go in.’

 

They had to go back around the side of the house to enter through the front door. Standing in the front hallway you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. The house was clean and tidy, well lived in, and covered in photographs of what looked like a very large family. Siblings from both sides, kids, what looked like grandkids; Nick studied the photos as they made their way into the house but he didn’t see anyone he recognised.

 

‘Three mugs on the kitchen table,’ Hank murmured. ‘They knew their attacker or at the very least let him in.’

 

‘Might help us narrow it down.’ Nick poked around a little more but there wasn’t much to be seen inside the house. Judging from the extra coffee cup, the Dent’s had let their attacker in and sat with him or her for a while. Long enough to drink all of the coffee or tea in their mugs, long enough for their visitor to make them comfortable enough to lead him/her outside into the backyard.

 

There was an evidence marker on the table with the mugs but no evidence they’d been tested for prints or swabbed for DNA just yet. Nick tried to put together an image in his mind of the moment, the Dent’s sitting around talking to their visitor, feeling at ease – had they known their attacker quite well? – or agitated – an unpleasant visit – as they sat around the table talking. There was no evidence left behind as to the identity of the visitor, nothing to confirm he or she was even the attacker but Nick was betting they were one and the same just from the fact the coffee mugs hadn’t been cleared away.

 

Of course, there was every chance the third person sitting at the table was in chunks out in the backyard, waiting for CSU to find a piece big enough to identify. Nick didn’t imagine this was going to be a quick autopsy, putting the pieces of each victim back together would slow them down considerably. Without an actual wood chipper to support Hank’s half-hearted theory, it would be a while before they even had a cause of death. They really didn’t have a lot to work with. Interviewing friends and relatives would hopefully provide them with a list of enemies they could track down and interview. Nick wasn’t holding out hope that any of those interviews would hand them the link they needed to Black Claw. So far, the dealings they’d had with the shady group didn’t suggest finding the evidence they truly needed to bring the group down would come from such a violent slaughter.

 

No, taking Black Claw down was going to involve thinking and dealing like a hexenbiest or the Royals. Money and power were two things they seemed familiar with and Kenneth was right that it was where they were going to be able to hit Black Claw the hardest. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice if this double homicide couldn’t provide them with some extra evidence to back up their claims that Black Claw was a violent and destructive movement that only got people killed and not the acknowledgement they were looking for as a people.

 

‘Let’s go talk to the next of kin,’ Nick suggested.

 

By the time Hank dropped him home that night, Nick was exhausted. He’d missed dinner (and lunch), surviving the day on what little coffee he could gulp down between interviews. He really just wanted food and to fall into bed but when he stepped through the garage doors that someone up in the loft had opened for him he was brought up short by the changes the garage had undergone. The new door to the Grimm room was in place, keypad and biometric lock fixed to the wall beside it. The garage was clean and now had lines on the floor marking off three distinct angled parking spaces, two of which were occupied by his and Adalind’s cars, the third, presumably for Josh or whoever was using the apartment.

 

The new elevator opened when he put in the code and he stepped inside. The actual elevator hadn’t been replaced but the grating had been upgraded to a heavy-duty steel that was surprisingly easy to lift and lower. When he stepped out into the loft he followed the sound of voices through the new archway and into the expanded section of the loft. The _finished_ expanded section of the loft, complete with new bathroom, two new bedrooms and a potential third bedroom/study. Nick looked around in a bit of a daze, sure he hadn’t been at work that long and continued to follow the sound of voices until he found Adalind and Diana in the room Diana had clearly claimed as her own.

 

He paused in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and just observed them. The only furniture in the room was the bed Diana had chosen for herself. She looked tiny, lying in the middle of it but the size didn’t seem daunting to her. Adalind was lying next to her and they were reading _Where the Wild Things Are_.

 

Nick was struck by the reality of his life in that moment. After a day spent dealing with Meisner and Chavez at HW, plotting to kill the group behind Black Claw and a truly horrible afternoon spent dealing with the family of two much-loved victims of Black Claw (who weren’t even wesen), he got to come home to his wife and daughter who were doing something so ordinary as reading a story before bed.

 

Diana was wearing a brand-new pair of pyjamas with bright orange and red fish on them and Adalind was wearing her most comfy sweat pants and an oversized t-shirt (that wasn’t really oversized anymore because it sat tight against her belly) and that scene did more to undo the stress of the day than food and sleep could have done.

 

‘Hey,’ he greeted, when Adalind paused to turn the page.

 

They both looked up and smiled at him. He expected the loving look on Adalind’s face but the love on Diana’s took him a little by surprise though not nearly as much as her words did. ‘Hi Daddy,’ she greeted, wriggling so she was pressed closer to Adalind’s side. ‘Come listen.’

 

Nick’s eyes flew to Adalind’s and she grinned at him, tilting her head pointedly to the space on Diana’s other side. Nick hesitated for only a moment before he kicked off his boots and settled into place on Diana’s other side. When he was settled, back pressed against the headboard and legs stretched out before him, Diana wriggled again until she was pressed against him. He lifted an arm over her shoulders and she nestled against his side. She made a content little hum and Adalind started reading again.

 

Nick let the sound of her voice wash over him, the sense of contentment fill him until he felt as though it had soaked deep into his bones and washed away the horror of the day. This was what he was fighting for. This little moment with his wife and daughter was exactly what he was fighting to keep safe. He’d never expected to have this with Adalind but now that he had it he could admit that plotting to murder – because it was murder – ten people was the least he would do to keep it. If he had to, he would kill every last member of the group by himself, he would slaughter every single member of Black Claw and HW just to keep his family safe.

 

He’d never imagined he would be that kind of man, the kind to put a single person (or three) above everyone else but now that he was here, sitting with his family in the home they were building together he could freely admit that he would burn all of Portland to the ground just to keep them safe. Killing a group of wesen responsible for death and destruction would be easy compared to that. There would be no twinge to his conscience for the thought, no worry about laws and oaths he’d taken as a cop. He was a Grimm with a family to keep safe and if anyone tried to harm them he would make what happened to the wesenrein look like child’s play.

 

When Adalind was finished reading they took it in turns to kiss Diana goodnight. Adalind left the room first, pausing just outside the door so that she could watch Nick as he finished pulling the covers into place around Diana. ‘We’ll leave the door open,’ he told Diana. ‘You can come get us if you get scared, okay?’

 

Diana nodded. ‘I didn’t ask,’ she said sleepily.

 

‘Ask what?’ he asked her quietly.

 

‘If you wanted to be my daddy.’

 

There was a sniffle from the door that Nick knew was Adalind trying really hard not to cry but he ignored her for the moment, placing all of his attention on Diana. ‘You didn’t have to ask,’ he told her. ‘I would love to be your daddy.’

 

‘Yeah?’

 

Nick grinned. ‘Yeah.’ He kissed her one last time on the forehead and whispered, ‘Goodnight, Diana.’

 

‘Night, daddy.’

 

In the hallway, after he’d turned out the light in Diana’s room he just looked at Adalind. She was definitely crying but the smile on her face was so big it threatened to engulf her. ‘Oh, shut up!’ she told him when he couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m happy,’ she told him, reaching out to take his hand. ‘I am so happy.’

 

‘Me too,’ Nick told her, as if there was any question. ‘I love you.’

 

‘I love you, too,’ she told him, leading him back into the original section of the loft.

 

He might have been tired and still hungry with Black Claw and HW looming over his head but that didn’t change the fact that in that moment, Nick had everything he wanted and he wouldn’t change it for the world.


	40. Chapter 37

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, this chapter hasn't been edited thoroughly. Sorry for any mistakes or confusing word arrangements.

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 37**

He was in the midst of a deep dreamless sleep when his phone started screeching at him. Screeching might have been a bit of a strong word for it but the sound of the ringer shattered the silence in the loft, causing Nick to lurch upright in bed and reach for his gun before he realised it was just his phone and not the security alarm sounding out a breach.

 

Beside him, Adalind lurched upright with surprising speed, though much less grace. In the dark, it was hard to see the expression on her face but he assumed it was fear turned relief much like his own. He scrambled for his phone as Adalind hit the light and then answered it to a frightened yell from the other end of the loft.

 

‘Mom!’

 

While Adalind hurried out of bed to check on Diana (who Nick hoped had only been woken by the phone) he blearily swiped to answer, just making out Trubel’s name on the caller ID. ‘Yeah?’ he grunted, more asleep than awake. He had no idea what time it was and with all the shutters (new and reinforced) closed there wasn’t much to give away from the light level outside.

 

‘You need to get to HW now!’ Trubel hissed. There was the sound of something heavy falling and then what Nick could only call an explosion and Trubel swore. ‘Hurry!’

 

She hung up on him and for a moment all Nick could do was stare at his phone in confusion. Then Trubel’s words and the tension in her voice penetrated his sleep muzzled mind and he launched himself out of bed, grabbing the closest pair of jeans he could find and not even bothering to change from the t-shirt he’d been sleeping in. Adalind came back into the room with Diana on her hip just as he was lacing up his boots. Without a word, she opened the standing wardrobe (the one he knew she was plotting to throw away and build a proper walk-in robe) and handed him a jacket. He smiled his thanks and she followed him as he made a beeline for the elevator, snatching up his keys and badge on the way. Adalind had retrieved his (police issued) gun from the lock box by the elevator and handed it to him.

 

‘Trubel needs help,’ he told her, bending to grip the grate and slide it up. ‘Something’s happening at HW.’

 

‘Be careful,’ Adalind told him and he could read in her expression that she wished she could go with him. ‘Come home safe.’

 

He kissed her quickly, dropped a kiss on Diana’s head and yanked the grate down. As the elevator started its decent he heard Diana ask where he was going. He hadn’t even stopped to check that she was okay and he felt bad for it but explosions in the background of a phone call with Trubel had to take precedence over what he hoped was just Diana getting scared by the sudden, unbelievably loud, ring of his phone.

 

He called Monroe as soon as he was in the car and backing out of the garage. ‘Nick?’ Monroe croaked. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

 

He did, he’d glimpsed the time briefly before he’d called Monroe, even if he hadn’t the clock on his dash read 3:34AM. ‘Something’s happening at HW, Trubel needs help.’

 

Monroe’s tone changed instantly. ‘We’ll meet you there.’

 

He got the same response when he called Hank and Wu but his call went unanswered when he tried both Renard and Kenneth which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He’d only tried calling them to keep them informed, not because he expected either of them to help. It was probably better if they didn’t help, he wasn’t sure how much they would help in a fight and how much them being there would just prove a hindrance.

 

The streets were quiet as he made his way out of Portland, staring out in an old industrial lot where the old paint factory was let him avoid an of the early (really early) morning traffic there might be going through the city. Worried as he was about Trubel and what was going on at HW, Nick’s mind still found the time to muse over finding a decent school for Diana and his son. It wasn’t like they were zoned for much of anything where they were even if he didn’t think they were going to be looking at private schools.

 

He wasn’t sure if that was his minds way of coping with his worry about Trubel or if he was just so used to this kind of thing that thinking about zoning for schools was the sort of thing he thought about at three in the morning on the way to a shady government facility that sounded as though it were being attacked.

 

Could have been a bit of both, really.

 

He beat the others to the little side road he’d designated as their meeting point. The others hadn’t been out to HW before so he’d told them to meet him at the end of one of the forest roads that was about a mile down the trail from the entrance to HW’s bunker. Even if they had been before, Nick didn’t think it was a good idea for them to go rushing in separately, he had no idea what was waiting for him inside the bunker.

 

While he waited for his friends to show, he tried calling Trubel. The first time the call couldn’t even connect, it just went straight to voicemail. The second and third time it rang and rang until voicemail kicked in and the fourth time he tried he got a message saying the phone was currently unavailable. He was definitely worried now that he couldn’t get hold of Trubel. He’d been expecting to hear form her all day while he was working that Black Claw double homicide but she hadn’t called and he’d only been able to leave her a short voicemail.

 

He had no idea how her talk with Meisner had gone but he figured it was safe to assume the sound of the explosion in the background of her phone call didn’t bode well. The sound of a car was the first warning he got that someone was approaching before headlights swept over him. He flinched away from the sudden light and a moment later he could make out Rosalee’s car as she pulled up behind him. Nick pocketed his phone and got out to meet them. He hadn’t been expecting Josh as well but he wasn’t really surprised to see him. He couldn’t imagine that, had the new Grimm been staying in the apartment beneath him at the loft, he wouldn’t somehow have found his way to tagging along.

 

‘Anything?’ Josh asked, coming around the back of the car to join Monroe and Rosalee with Nick.

 

Nick shook his head. ‘Either it rings out and I get voicemail or I just get bounced straight to voicemail.’

 

‘What happened?’ Rosalee asked.

 

‘I don’t know. Trubel called asking for help, there was the sound of something exploding and then she either hung up on me or the call cut out.’

 

‘Exploding?’ Monroe repeated with alarm. ‘You heard an explosion?’

 

‘I don’t think it was a big one,’ Nick tried to sound reassuring but the longer they stood waiting on the sound of the road, the longer they were leaving Trubel on her own to deal with god knew what.

 

As if his thoughts had pulled them closer, another set of headlights lit up the night and Hank and WU were climbing out of Wu’s personal vehicle. They didn’t waste time after that, Nick filled Hank and Wu in on what little they knew as they all rounded the back of his Land Cruiser. In the back, stashed in the well of the spare tyre was a handy little arsenal, Nick took everywhere with him now. He started handing out weapons but Hank and Wu had already come with their own. Josh hesitated for a moment before he took a knife and a shot gun.

 

Nick didn’t know how much training Josh had had with HW before they tortured the Grimm out of him but he didn’t think a week on and off with his mother was going to be enough for something like this. Nick wouldn’t force him to wait back with the cars, though, not when it was Trubel in possible danger.

 

‘We’re walking from here,’ Nick told them. ‘I only know of one entry to the bunker and it’s basically a giant storm drain. I don’t want to leave the cars there if something bad is happening.’

 

‘I don’t think I want to leave us there,’ Wu muttered. ‘Do we know anything about this place?’

 

Nick shook his head. ‘Not enough. I can get us through the initial blast doors and along the path we took when we met with Meisner and Chavez but I didn’t get to explore much. Adalind saw more than I did but I’m not sure she’d be much help either, even if she was here.’

 

‘So, we go in, find Trubel, try not to get lost or blown up and get out?’ Josh surmised.

 

‘Pretty much,’ Nick confirmed.

 

Josh nodded as though he’d known that was what was coming but had secretly been hoping for something that better resembled a successful plan. Nick wasn’t too worried, though, he’d dealt with this kind of chaos before.

 

‘Anyone tries to kill you, kill them back,’ Nick advised. ‘Anyone else, you don’t recognise them, subdue them. We can sort out the good from the bad later.’ He looked around at his friends and asked, ‘We good?’

 

‘Yeah, man,’ Hank assured him. ‘Let’s go.’

 

They made the trek through the woods to the bunker mostly in silence, though Nick took the time to point out the two cameras they passed that he’d noticed on that first day he’d come with Trubel and Adalind. Which he realised was only the day before. The double homicide had taken a lot out of him, all that scheming, finding out about Mendelson and Black Claw owning HW, it made it seem like weeks had passed between his visits, not mere hours.

 

When they approached the bunker the first time, things had been quiet, all the activity was underground – or possibly muffled by decent soundproofing – but this time, Nick could hear soft thumping, screaming and shouts before they’d even reached the mouth of the tunnel. At the mouth of the tunnel, the sounds became so loud he didn’t need his Grimm hearing, Hank and Wu could clearly hear it too.

 

The lighting in the tunnel had dropped even lower, the faded green glow replaced with dim orange emergency lighting that flashed at random, suggesting whatever was powering it wasn’t working to full potential. Nick exchanged one last glance with his friends before he started into the tunnel, Josh behind him and slightly to the left with Hank and Wu in the middle and Monroe and Rosalee taking up the rear. Someone who didn’t know what they were looking at might have found it strange that Hank and Wu, the two trained police officers were in the middle. Someone, that is, who didn’t know Rosalee and Monroe were far more dangerous.

 

The blast doors were wedged open with a heavy steel bar, the camera above them sparking and hanging by a couple of fraying wires. Nick studied the doors but in the dim tunnel light he couldn’t see any sign that they’d been forced open from the outside. If he had to guess, he’d say they were opened from the inside and then jammed to prevent someone from closing them. Though who exactly had opened them and then jammed them he had no idea. He didn’t even know why someone might have done that.

 

…unless those two prisoner Trubel and Adalind released had done more damage than they’d expected. It was a possible explanation but one that Nick didn’t feel was right.

 

Cautiously, he poked his head through the gap in the blast doors and glanced around the hallway on the other side. The control panel for the doors on the inside of the facility was a mess of broken components and live wires. It looked like someone had driven something heavy right into the panel to prevent it being used. There wasn’t anyone in the hallway, though, so Nick slipped through, pushing forward enough to give Josh and the others room to squeeze through after him but not far enough forward that he put any doorways between them.

 

Just as Monroe slipped through the doors there was a deep, muffled WHOMP, and the ceiling above them shook, raining cement dust and a lighting strip down on them. ‘I don’t like this,’ Josh murmured, having quickly sidestepped to avoid the lighting strip which smashed at his feet.

 

‘Me either,’ Nick told him. ‘Come on, this way.’

 

‘Follow the sounds of screaming?’ Wu quipped without any real humour.

 

Nick didn’t bother responding, he did lead them deeper into the bunker – following the sounds of shouts and screams. The first person they came across was missing half his face and thankfully (for him) was very dead. He was slumped against the wall wearing riot gear that hadn’t helped one bit, the helmet had been caved in on one side taking half his face with it. Nick barely spared the man a glance, Josh surprised him by not uttering a sound, either. Though, later Nick would have time to realise that in fighting his way out of another HW facility, of being tortured by them for days, possibly weeks, Josh had seen much more than the man who had first turned up on Nick’s doorstep.

 

Seen and likely done, so much more.

 

When the corridor forked, Nick chose to turn left, it wasn’t the same way he’d gone the day before but it was the direction the trail of bodies led. He figured that whatever or whoever had killed the men and women crumpled along the hallways was probably what they needed to find. If Trubel was standing, Nick had no doubt that was where she’d be.

 

One moment they were following the trail the next, they rounded a corner and there was no time to turn away before a woman in the same riot gear (but covered in blood and minus the helmet) was charging at Nick. He fired two shots but it was Josh’s blast from the shotgun that took the woman straight in the face that knocked her down. Nick didn’t know whether she was wesen or not, likely wouldn’t ever know but she wasn’t trying to kill him anymore.

 

He’d have turned to check on Josh but the corridor was suddenly full of people and shouting and Nick had to dive forward to bat a knife away before it made a home in his ribs. The lights were flashing on and off and he got the impression that in the middle of all the fighting there was a short younger man scrambling to get away but Nick’s entire focus was on not getting killed and not accidentally killing one of his friends.

 

He ducked an elbow, kicked at a knee, punched someone else in the throat, the tight confines of the hallway meant that at one point he bounced off Josh’s back and had to duck under Rosalee’s vicious swipe. Blood sprayed across his face where her claws made contact with someone’s throat but it wasn’t his and that was all that mattered for the moment.

 

Someone screamed, someone else yelled, there was another WHOMP and the ground shook hard enough that Nick lost his footing, slipping on the blood slick floor to land on his ass right on top of a woman who had been making a garb for Hank’s ankles. He knocked the air out of her lungs and managed to elbow her in the face before she recovered enough to take another swipe at Hank. Josh’s shot gun sounded again and then there was nothing filling the corridor but the sound of their heavy breathing.

 

The sounds of fighting still drifting to them from deeper inside the bunker, though.

 

‘Anyone hurt?’ Nick asked, climbing to his feet and wiping his sleeve across his face to clear away some of the blood. He only succeeded in making it worse but he wouldn’t realise that until he got home.

 

‘Few bumps and scrapes,’ Hank answered. ‘Nothing serious.’

 

Everyone else said they were fine and so, Nick retrieved his gun, slipped it into the holster on his belt and took up a machete one of the women in riot gear had been wielding. Josh was studying a couple of the dead, frowning over what he was seeing. ‘These guys are HW,’ he said pointing to a man and woman. ‘I recognise them but those three are Black Claw – they were on the list of most wanted, the Walker triplets.’

 

‘They’re all wearing the same uniform,’ Wu noted.

 

‘They could have snuck in or already been here,’ Hank observed. ‘Were they fighting us or each other?’

 

‘Both,’ Nick said, that had been his impression before everything had gotten hazy in the fight. ‘Come on, we still need to find Trubel.’

 

Finding Trubel was easier said than done, they made their way through the maze of corridors and though they encountered several wesen that wanted to kill them (they weren’t successful) they didn’t find anyone who could tell them where Trubel might be, those willing to talk (okay one woman who looked more girl than woman and was a little preoccupied trying to keep her guts where they belonged) and the few they tried to threaten into talking didn’t know. Josh could only accurately guess which were HW and which were Black Claw half the time and that wasn’t even factoring in which members of HW were Black Claw moles.

 

They reached a dead end. The corridor they’d been following just stopped, an open office door on Nick’s left showed an empty room (it counted as empty if the only person in there was dead, right?) and a supply closet on the right. Nick was about to tell them all to turn back when he heard something. He motioned his friends to pause and listened intently for the sound. He heard it again, a pained gasp and ragged breathing and it was coming from the supply closet.

 

He nodded to the door and Hank stepped forward, gun trained on the door and Nick slowly reached for the handle. With a sharp twist her threw the door open and Hank stepped up to peer inside. Hank tensed and then relaxed and Nick peered inside to see Chavez slumped against a row of metal shelves at the back of the room. One of her legs was bent in front of her at a bad angle and there was blood pouring down from a headwound. Nick didn’t imagine she could see much of anything but she her grip on the gun she was pointing at Hank was steady all the same.

 

For a moment, they just stared at each other and then Chavez slumped, gun slipping from suddenly lax fingers to fall into her lap. ‘Burkhardt,’ she wheezed drawing Nick into the room. When he got closer he saw that the blood covering her front wasn’t all from the headwound. She’d taken three shots as well, two to the upper chest and one through her left arm. The pain must have been excruciating and he was impressed by the steady hold she’d had on her gun.

 

‘What happened here?’ Nick asked, he wanted to apply pressure, to do something to help but there was simply too much. She’d lost too much blood, she knew it too.

 

‘We didn’t know,’ she told him, eyes pleading with him to understand.

 

‘Didn’t know what?’

 

‘About Mendelson.’ She coughed and blood bubbled up her throat, spilling down her chin. ‘We didn’t know.’

 

‘Meisner?’ Nick asked, wondering if that was who she meant by “we”.

 

Chavez nodded slowly. ‘Thought we…were…doing the…right…’

 

‘Thing?’ Nick finished for her. ‘You thought HW was doing the right thing?’

 

Again, Chavez nodded, ‘We didn’t know.’

 

‘What happened here? Where’s Trubel?’

 

‘Found out,’ Chavez tried. ‘All wrong.’

 

‘What was?’ Nick demanded. ‘Who found out?’

 

‘Black Claw,’ Chavez’s eyes were drooping, she didn’t have much time left. ‘We didn’t know.’

 

‘I know.’

 

‘Sorry,’ Chavez whispered. ‘Di – didn’t…know…’

 

Her eyes slipped closed and all Nick could do was watch as her breathing slowed until it stopped and her body slumped, sliding sideways against the shelving. Nick hadn’t liked the woman, hadn’t liked the way she’d treated Josh and Trubel, even him, but he wouldn’t have wished this kind of death on her. Not when it seemed she hadn’t known about Black Claw owning HW, not when she death was coming on the heels of realising everything she’d been working for was a lie.

 

‘We need to go,’ Wu said suddenly. ‘Something’s happening.’

 

Nick emerged from the supply closet and started to ask what Wu meant but then he heard it. The sounds had changed. Gone were the screams and shouts, the sound of muffled explosion and shots from deeper in the facility. Now there was just a quiet that settled over them, sending chills down Nick’s spine. The silence was more alarming than the screams.

 

With no more sound to follow, they backtracked the way they’d come until there was a different corridor for them to follow. It took three turns and shoving through a broken door before Nick recognised where they were. He was sure they’d taken this corridor the day before and that if they made three more turns they’d be in the room with the screen where he’d learned the identities of the secret society.

 

They only made it through one more turn before they encountered the zauberbiest Adalind and Trubel had set free. He might not have seen the man for himself but the way he was walking toward them without seeming to be aware of his surroundings, without seeming to be aware of anything, was a dead giveaway. Any thought Nick might have had that his apparent unawareness would allow them to slip passed him, was dashed the moment Nick stepped around the corner. He might not have known they were there, not exactly, but that didn’t stop him from lashing out at them.

 

An invisible weight slammed into Nick, tossing him into the wall while a broken piece of door smacked into Josh, sending him careening back into Hank and Monroe. Rosalee took an angry step forward and was pinned to the floor by the same force holding Nick to the wall. Wu managed to duck the piece of door thrown at him and pulled his gun up, firing a shot that struck the man directly between the eyes. Nick hit the floor, Rosalee stopped wriggling and pulled herself to her feet.

 

‘Everyone okay?’ Wu asked.

 

‘I’m good,’ Nick groaned, rubbing his chest. It had been a while since he’d been thrown against something by a hexenbiest. He thought he preferred it when it was Adalind doing the throwing.

 

When they finally reached the room with the screens they didn’t find Trubel but they did find Meisner. He was crouched on the floor, sporting several bullet wounds of his own but ignoring them in favour of interrogating what looked like one of his own men. The man, also wearing the riot gear, looked to be worse off that Chavez, Nick didn’t know how he was even conscious and talking.

 

‘Meisner,’ Nick called, stepping into the room cautiously, swinging his gaze to the other doors leading into the room. He didn’t think Meisner would have been so absorbed in his task if there was a danger coming from another direction but Nick wasn’t about to risk any surprises.

 

With a frustrated growl, Meisner reached forward and twisted the man’s head sharply, snapping his neck. He then pushed himself to his feet and turned to greet Nick and his friends. His shoulders were slightly hunched and he was holding one arm across his stomach but they were the only signs the man was in any pain.

 

‘You were right,’ he growled, ‘about Black Claw and HW.’

 

Nick wasn’t sure what Meisner wanted to hear in response, he wasn’t about to gloat or drop an “I told you so”, it wasn’t that sort of moment. In fact, the only thing Nick wanted to talk about right then was Trubel.

 

‘Have you seen Trubel?’ he asked. ‘We haven’t seen her.’

 

Meisner shook his head. ‘I lost touch with her over an hour ago.’

 

‘What happened?’

 

‘We were breached,’ Meisner replied. ‘It looks like someone flagged the search on Mendelson. As soon as we started to look closer, Black Claw’s mole here was alerted. We think they let a small team inside the bunker but security was down and the men I sent to bring it back online never returned.’

 

‘They’re all dead,’ Nick told him curtly. ‘Chavez too.’

 

‘Chavez is dead?’

 

‘We left her body in a storage closet,’ Josh told Meisner, sounding not at all upset that she was gone. ‘Everyone else we’ve come across has tried to kill us or is already dead.’

 

‘And you’ve seen no sign of Trubel?’

 

‘No,’ Josh confirmed. ‘The Walker triplets are dead.’

 

‘They were here?’ Meisner’s expression darkened at the news. ‘You’re sure?’

 

Josh nodded, his own expression dark and Nick wondered what the triplets had done to land on HW’s most wanted list. ‘I’m sure,’ Josh snapped. ‘They were wearing riot gear just like your men.’

 

‘Do you think they were already inside?’ Meisner didn’t sound accusing, he didn’t sound as though he was cautioning Josh to speak carefully, he sounded as though he genuinely wanted Josh’s opinion, which surprised Josh more than anyone judging by the expression on his face.

 

Josh considered it for a while and nodded. ‘I don’t think this whole attack was planned, I think they were just trying to infiltrate HW and caught wind of something they didn’t like or didn’t want spread around.’

 

‘You’re suggesting the Walkers were high enough in Black Claw to know who is really pulling the strings.’

 

Josh shrugged. ‘It fits better, them sneaking in with the help of a mole and then seeing something they didn’t like. They might be high up the chain but they’re not known for their planning.’

 

‘That could mean Black Claw is unaware HW has fallen,’ Meisner murmured.

 

‘We haven’t been able to contact Trubel,’ Nick supplied. ‘The call’s get dropped or they’re just not connecting, chances are everyone else is having the same trouble.’

 

‘If word of this attack hasn’t reached Black Claw then there is a chance we can stop them before they act.’

 

‘We have too,’ Nick said simply. ‘We can’t have them openly declaring a war and if they come out of the shadows that’s exactly what will happen.’

 

‘We need to find Trubel,’ Rosalee reminded them. ‘She might know something about this attack, about what started it and who killed all of those men and women in the corridors.’

 

‘I think they killed each other,’ Wu announced. ‘Some of them at least.’

 

‘I’d say Chavez killed the Walkers,’ Josh added ‘She was close enough to where we found them that it’s reasonable to assume it was her.’

 

‘That zauberbiest probably killed a few, too,’ Monroe pointed out.

 

‘We need to go,’ Nick said firmly. ‘We need to find Trubel and we need to get out of here. Lock it up tight until we’ve dealt with Black Claw.’

 

‘I have everything we need to fight Black Claw hidden away,’ Meisner admitted. ‘Copies of files and research.’

 

‘What about all the people working for HW that are still in the field?’ Hank asked. ‘What happens to the ones who try to make contact? What about the ones who are really Black Claw?’

 

‘There are people I recruited personally,’ Meisner told them, ‘those we can trust. The rest, we need to check and eliminate.’

 

‘What about the Grimms?’ Josh asked. ‘We need their help taking down the secret society.’

 

‘They’ll do what is needed,’ Meisner said simply. ‘They have no love for our organisation only what we stand for.’

 

Which Nick supposed probably answered the question of just how HW got a bunch of Grimms to work for them – by dangling the chance to hunt wesen in front of their faces until one by one they all took the bait and signed on. He wasn’t ruling out a few more cases of kidnapping, blackmail and bribery either.

 

‘We plan to take down the whole society in a simultaneous attack,’ he informed Meisner. ‘We were hoping to send those Grimms who work for you to take out the ones in Europe.’

 

Meisner nodded, apparently, he didn’t need time to consider Nick’s words. Not that it would have made much of a difference, they were going ahead with the plan either way, it would likely be a little easier to convince the Grimms of what was needed to be done it the orders were coming from Meisner who they trusted and not Trubel whose loyalty was in question. Although, Nick did wonder if his own name would carry weight with them and not necessarily the “Nick” portion but the weight of generations of Grimms associated with Burkhardt and Kessler, even any weight carried by the name Porter.

 

Surely, as Grimms themselves, they should be able to convince a bunch of Grimms that taking out a secret society of powerful hexenbiests was in the best interests of everyone. Maybe they should find a way to keep in touch. Being in contact with Trubel and his mother had proven invaluable to Nick, he couldn’t help feeling that banding together to take down the society behind Black Claw and HW would be a good way to create a Grimm network. One that was solely for Grimms and those they trusted, not a government agency bent on controlling them.

 

Before they could think about anything like that, they needed to get through the remnants of HW without getting killed. The first step of which was finding their wayward friend.

 

‘Let’s go find Trubel.’


	41. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no internet at home at the moment, haven't for a week now and that has put a serious crimp in my ability to post reliably. I'm burning through the little data I have left on my phone to update today. Thankfully, my contract month rolls over and so I should be good for next week.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and comments!

**Necessary Sins – Chapter 38**

Finding Trubel turned out to be as simple as rounding a corner and bumping into her. Whether they’d taken a turn they’d missed before or they’d simply passed by without even realising it, Nick rounded a corner in a corridor he could have sworn they’d been down before and found himself holding his gun on Trubel while she held a knife ready to strike.

 

‘Hey, Nick,’ she greeted calmly, once they’d lowered their weapons and had a moment to be grateful they had quick reflexes. Somehow, all that effort to find Trubel just would have seemed pointless if it all ended with them accidentally killing each other.

 

‘Trubel,’ Nick replied. ‘Are you alright?’ He looked her over briefly but, although she was covered in blood, she didn’t look to be hurt. He was aware his own clothes were covered in blood from the many people he’d fought. If Trubel had been in the very middle of the worst fighting (which had been over before Nick and his friends had arrived) then he was surprised she wasn’t covered in more blood.

 

She nodded in response to his question. ‘You?’ she glanced passed him, her question for all of them.

 

‘Yeah,’ he told her. ‘You ready to leave?’

 

Again, she nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone else alive back there.’

 

Meisner didn’t look pleased by Trubel’s words but he didn’t look surprised either. ‘We need to contact other branches,’ he told Trubel. ‘We need to know if others were hit.’

 

‘We can’t do it here,’ Trubel told him. ‘My phone’s dead, we’re sitting ducks.’

 

‘We’re out of time,’ Rosalee said. ‘If Black Claw attacked HW in other cities – other countries – then we’re out of time. We need to strike out at the Society and we need to do it now.’

 

Nick wished he could disagree with Rosalee’s assessment but even if she was wrong, they couldn’t afford to wait any longer to strike out at those pulling Black Claw and HW’s strings. As soon as word got out about how badly HW had been hit, Black Claw would make their own strike at the world to bring them closer to being out and in power. It was the last thing Nick wanted to do, give them an opportunity to get further ahead than they already were. So far, all it felt like they’d been doing was reacting, this time they needed to go on the offensive. By now he suspected Kenneth would have found addresses for each member of the secret society, they were going to have to strike without the extra days of surveillance and planning they’d originally been banking on.

 

‘We’ll go to the Spice Shop,’ Nick decided. ‘Do you think the other Grimms will help?’ he asked and this time the question was for Meisner and not just Trubel as he already knew her opinion.

 

Meisner nodded without hesitation. ‘They’ll help,’ he answered. ‘After the attack here, they’ll help even without my orders.’

 

Trubel and Meisner rode with Nick to the Spice Shop, both using the time to make phone calls contacting other branches of HW and those Grimms they were seeking help from. Nick only caught bits and pieces of conversation as he drove but it was enough to suggest Portland hadn’t been the only one hit, though the difference between each of the five attacks suggested it wasn’t a well-planned attack, rather it was almost reactionary.

 

‘Reacting to what?’ Monroe asked, when Nick voiced his opinion once they were gathered in the Shop and he and Rosalee were handing around coffee. No one had bothered suggesting going home for clean clothes and a shower (possibly a nap), the attack on HW here in Portland had pushed everything they’d been planning into the immediate future and not just the not-so-distant one they’d originally been banking on.

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick replied. He turned to Meisner. ‘Has HW received any information or prevented any attacks that might cause retaliation?’

 

‘Nothing more than usual,’ the ex-Resistance member said with an expression that suggested thwarting Black Claw attacks was an everyday occurrence at HW.

 

Which would have been fine if it didn’t look like their other everyday activities involved torturing innocent people to create Grimms and, well, who knew what they were trying to do to that zauberbiest.

 

‘Okay,’ Trubel broke in, ending yet another phone call on the cell she’d taken from a supply room at HW before they left, ‘that’s the last of the Grimms, they’re all in. All we have to do is tell them where to go and who their target is.’

 

Nick nodded, looking to Meisner. ‘Once we know where these society members are you can divide them between your people, we’ll take the rest – though with Bonaparte here in Portland, he’s mine.’

 

‘He’s also potentially the most powerful,’ Meisner pointed out.

 

‘I’m not running off to another country with Adalind about to give birth,’ Nick told him, tone brooking no room for argument. ‘I’ll find a way to deal with him.’

 

‘You’ll have to find a way to find him first,’ Wu pointed out. ‘Hasn’t your mom been trying to locate him for days?’

 

Nick’s nod was reluctant this time. ‘I know, but we don’t have a choice, we have to find him, we have to end this soon.’

 

No one argued with that and so they discussed the kind of arrangements that would need to be made while they waited for the rest of their allies to arrive. The one thing HW turned out to be good for was that, even if it was money from the same society that funded Black Claw, they could use it to pay their way. Meisner was happy to use HW’s funds to pay for flights and any accommodations necessary in the pursuit of taking down the society and Black Claw.

 

‘You realise this is going to be the end of HW, don’t you?’ Josh asked Meisner. ‘It has to be.’

 

‘Yes,’ Meisner acknowledged. ‘We can’t take the risk that the society -whatever remains of it after this – uses HW to rebuild.’

 

‘What will you do?’ Rosalee asked, interjecting a hint of optimism over the outcome of their fight that Nick wasn’t sure Meisner had been feeling.

 

‘I’m not sure.’

 

‘You could always come and work for us,’ Kenneth offered, and though the offer sounded genuine it also didn’t sound like Kenneth expected it to be accepted. He walked through to the side room, the King absent but Renard’s mother, Elizabeth, by his side.

 

Nick wanted to believe their arrival at the same time was coincidental but he couldn’t shake the feeling they’d been coming from the same suite at the hotel. He shook off the suspicion, not wanting to consider what Renard’s parents might be getting up to, now that they were once again in the same city. Though it was very telling, for other reasons, that the King had not shown himself. Either he didn’t believe this was something big enough to warrant his attention personally, or it was so big that he was keeping well out of it for his own safety.

 

Not waiting for Meisner to respond, either way, Kenneth held up a file, ‘The locations of each member of the society.’ He opened the file and placed it on the table, spreading the papers inside for everyone to see.

 

Nick moved forward and they all gathered around the work bench to have a look but before he could focus in on the sheet with Bonaparte’s information (he wanted to know if Kenneth had been more successful than his mother – he really hoped so), he was distracted by the Shop door opening and Adalind’s arrival with Diana.

 

‘Daddy!’ she cried, rushing up to him. He scooped her up without hesitation, wincing a moment later when he realised the blood he was covered in was now leaving sticky imprints on her clothes. Adalind looked too relieved to see him in one piece to growl at him for it.

 

‘Are you hurt?’ she asked him, coming to his side.

 

Diana was glued against his side, arms around his neck leaving him another side to draw Adalind against. ‘I’m fine.’ The feeling of eyes burning holes into the back of his head reminded him they weren’t only among friends. ‘I think there’s someone here who would very much like to meet you,’ he told Diana. ‘Would you like to meet your grandmother?’

 

‘I met Grandma, silly,’ Diana grinned.

 

‘You met Nick’s mom, honey,’ Adalind explained. ‘Elizabeth is your father’s mother and I think she’d love to meet you.’

 

That might have been a bit of an understatement, Nick remembered how Renard mentioned his mother asking after Diana but at the time they’d all thought she was still the super powered hexenbiest, Nick had just assumed that was the reason she’d been fighting so hard to meet her granddaughter. There was no way Renard hadn’t explained to his mother that Diana no longer had her powers, yet Elizabeth looked just as eager to meet Diana when Nick turned to look at her as Renard had made her out to be.

 

‘Hello, Diana,’ Elizabeth greeted with a smile.

 

‘Hi,’ Diana answered brightly, showing none of the shyness she’d previously shown Renard. ‘You’re really pretty.’

 

‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth smiled widely, looking happier than Nick was comfortable with. ‘You’re very pretty, too.’

 

There was that horrible twinge of guilt again. Nick sincerely doubted Elizabeth would let the Royals anywhere near Diana after the way they treated her and her son. In fact, thinking on it, she probably would have been a good help protecting Diana. She knew how to avoid detection by the Royals, she’d managed to protect her son from them for years – well from the King’s wife anyway – which had to say something about her skills.

 

‘Why don’t you go talk with your grandmother while your mom and I talk work.’ Without waiting for a response from Diana, Nick passed her over to Elizabeth. Diana might have been well and truly big enough to walk, to stand on her own feet but the look on Elizabeth’s face when she closed her arms around Diana was something Nick wasn’t likely to forget any time soon.

 

He didn’t know much about the woman, certainly not enough to let her walk out of the shop with Diana, but he got the feeling she was nothing like Adalind’s mother had been. The fact that Adalind hadn’t protested the introduction told him his instincts about the woman were correct. While Elizabeth sat with Diana on the cot, heads bent together in deep conversation, Nick turned back to the business of planning almost a dozen assassinations.

 

He’d just reached for the sheet on Bonaparte for the second time when the bell over the shop door announced the arrival of his mother, closely followed inside by Henrietta and then, before the door had even closed properly, Renard slipped inside. ‘Oh good,’ he said, ‘everyone’s here. I’ve got some news.’

 

‘More important than planning assassinations type news?’ Adalind asked.

 

‘I’ve just been approached by a representative of Black Claw, offering to back me if I run for mayor.’

 

There was a moment of silence while they took in the news, it was Hank who eventually broke the stunned silence with the question, ‘Why the hell do they want you to be mayor?’

 

‘No idea,’ Renard replied. ‘Is the name Rachel Woods familiar to any of you?’

 

They all shook their heads. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Nick told him. ‘We don’t have time to worry over what Black Claw wants from the mayor of Portland.’

 

‘I agree,’ Renard said. ‘I was surprised to be approached but I’m not about to throw in with Black Claw days before you plan to take them out.’

 

There was a note in Renard’s tone that suggested he wasn’t opposed to throwing in with Black Claw if it got him what he wanted. Nick guessed it was a good thing, then, that Black Claw was about to be nothing more than a handful of people standing around barking about how things should be – back to the powerless group of wesen boasting about big changes that were about to be made.

 

‘Now that we’re all here, let’s get this done.’

 

Meisner studied the sheets of paper, handing the one about Bonaparte to Nick without comment. ‘These,’ he indicated several sheets, ‘we can assign to the Grimms working for HW. They’re all close enough that I can have my people there in a couple of hours, six at most.’ He slid a piece across the benchtop to Kenneth. ‘This one is yours.’

 

Kenneth nodded, taking the sheet of paper. ‘I assumed,’ he agreed. ‘The King and I will be returning to Austria within the hour, we have a private plane waiting.’

 

‘I’ll take this one,’ Elizabeth offered approaching the table to pick up another sheet. Nick hadn’t even seen her look at them which added more credence to his earlier assumption that she and Kenneth had been coming from the same place.  ‘Kenneth can give me a ride to Vienna and then I can take a train or a flight from there.’

 

‘Josh and I will take Mandelson,’ Trubel announced. ‘She’s here in the country, leaves us closer if Adalind pops.’

 

Adalind smiled at her.

 

‘I’ll help Nick with Bonaparte,’ Renard offered, surprising Nick who had assumed, as helpful as Renard was attempting to be, that the captain would avoid getting tangled up in this fight. ‘You’ll need my help,’ he explained simply.

 

‘He has help,’ Monroe pointed out, though he didn’t sound offended. Likely, he saw the wisdom in having a zauberbiest, even a half-zauberbiest, to fight a full-fledged and powerful one.

 

‘That just leaves you two,’ Kenneth said, glancing between Henrietta and Nick’s mom. He held up the remaining two members of the society for them to look at.

 

‘I’ll take this one,’ Henrietta said, plucking the information for Halliday out of Kenneth’s grip. ‘I know someone in the area who owes me a favour.’

 

Nick glance at the sheet his mother was left to take, she nodded, looking satisfied. ‘I know this area. Shouldn’t be too hard to find Ruben.’

 

‘Are we still planning to coordinate our attack?’ Trubel asked.

 

‘We’ll need to,’ Nick nodded.

 

‘We need to take them by surprise,’ Kenneth agreed.

 

‘We don’t want to give them time to warn the others,’ Meisner added.

 

Wu opened up his laptop on the table and within a few moments had a number of flights up on screen. ‘Most of these locations have flights going out in the next hour or two. Allowing for, say, seventeen hours, flight time and transit, it looks like we could have everyone in position in twenty hours.’

 

‘Let’s make it thirty-six to give time to familiarise ourselves with our targets,’ Meisner suggested. ‘We strike together.’

 

‘Thirty-six hours, then.’ They all agreed.

 

‘Alright.’ Wu looked around at them all. ‘Who needs flights booked?’

 

Seemingly, within no time at all, the Spice Shop had emptied out. Elizabeth left with Kenneth (after exchanging numbers with Adalind and goodbye kisses with Diana and her son), Trubel and Josh slipped out to pack before their flight (showering off the blood and grime from the fight at HW was also necessary if they wanted to get through airport security), Meisner left with a frown and talk about cleaning up the bodies at HW and Henrietta left for her own task, with Hank and Wu trailing behind her – they had to be at work soon and were in a similar state of bloodiness to Nick.

 

‘Don’t bother coming in to work,’ Renard told Nick. ‘Focus on Bonaparte and call me when you have a location.’

 

Nick nodded and Renard left, sliding a glance toward Diana as he did. He hadn’t approached her once during the meeting, seeming not to know how to talk to her. Nick wasn’t sure where the hesitance was coming from but until it started to affect Diana he wasn’t going to worry about it.

 

‘I haven’t been able to follow Bonaparte beyond the hotel,’ his mother warned him. ‘He’s never surrounded by more than two others, though.’

 

Nick nodded, considering what he’d already learnt about Bonaparte from his own brief observations and all he’d been able to pick up form his mother and Henrietta. ‘Maybe if we can get rid of his security detail we can slip in and take him.’

 

‘If we weren’t just planning on killing him, I’d suggest trying to arrest him,’ Monroe admitted.

 

‘Yeah, but if I arrest him and then kill him there’ll be a lot of paperwork and even more questions.’

 

‘I know,’ Monroe acknowledged, sounding annoyed by the truth of Nick’s words. ‘How are we going to do this?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Nick admitted. ‘We’ve got thirty-six hours to figure it out.’

 

There didn’t seem to be much more they could say after that and they were all desperate for a hot shower and some food. Saying goodbye to Monroe and Rosalee, Nick and his mother climbed into his Land Cruiser and trailed Adalind back to the loft. Now that the larger, structural changes had been made, the crew working on the loft was a lot smaller, small enough that they could keep their cars and tools inside the garage and away from prying eyes. It made for a tight fit, when he pulled in to his spot beside Adalind but it would be well worth it.

 

‘You might want to make sure they haven’t turned the water off before you try to shower,’ Adalind cautioned as they stepped into the elevator.

 

The loud rumble of his stomach cut off whatever response he might have and set Diana into a fit of giggles.

 

Amused, Adalind looked down at Diana and said, ‘Maybe we should make Daddy some breakfast while he gets cleaned up, what do you think?’

 

Diana giggled again, nodding very seriously. ‘Can we make pancakes?’

 

‘How about some eggs and bacon?’

 

Diana scrunched up her nose. ‘I don’t like bacon.’

 

‘Neither do I,’ Adalind told her, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘But Daddy loves it.’

 

How he’d ended up loving a woman who didn’t like bacon, Nick had no idea, but he wasn’t about to argue when she still cooked it for him – special occasions only, mostly he had to cook it for himself. When the elevator stopped and they opened the grate into the loft Adalind and Diana made for the kitchen while Nick went in search of someone who could tell him if he could use the water or not – he could but they were going to want to switch it off in thirty minutes so he was advised to hurry if he wanted the plumbing in his daughter’s bathroom to work by end of day.

 

Nick wasn’t sure he needed the plumbing in Diana’s bathroom to work by the end of the day but he did know that Adalind wanted it done because if they were finished with the new one in the expanded part of the loft then they could start on their bathroom. Nick had been assured that adding the connecting door between the old bathroom and their bedroom was the easiest thing they needed to do, even if they had to build steps going down to it.

 

Whatever made Adalind happy, though, was well worth the inconvenience of having a gaping hole in his bedroom wall for a night or two.

 

He showered quickly and when he emerged freshly dressed form the bedroom to join Adalind and Diana for breakfast his mother was at the table as well, a freshly packed bag resting by the elevator. He didn’t know where she’d been keeping it because he hadn’t seen it around the loft – he wasn’t even sure she had enough belongings on her at the moment to fill it.

 

‘Do you want a ride to the airport?’ Adalind was asking when Nick sat down.

 

His mother hesitated for a moment before nodding. ‘Thank you.’

 

‘Are you going away?’ Diana demanded.

 

‘For a little while,’ Kelly told her. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

 

‘Do I have to come?’

 

‘No,’ Kelly assured Diana. ‘You get to stay with your mom this time.’

 

‘Good,’ Diana said firmly. ‘But I’ll miss you.’

 

‘I’ll miss you, too.’

 

‘We’ve got a few minutes before they shut the water off again,’ Adalind said to Nick, drawing his attention away from his mother and daughter. ‘We need to soak yours and Diana’s clothes to get the blood out if we’re not going to be able to wash them straight off.’

 

It was such a mundane, every day thing to say that it took a moment for her words to sink in. Soaking the blood stains out of not only his own clothing but her daughter’s was breakfast acceptable conversation. If he hadn’t already married her, he definitely would have been tempted to ask her then and there. He had to settle for an, ‘I love you.’

 

Bemused, Adalind smiled at him. ‘Love you, too.’ She pushed her chair back from the table and picked up her plate. ‘Go get your clothes so I can fill the laundry sink before the water gets shut off.’

 

‘We have a laundry sink now?’

 

His surprise seemed to amuse Adalind even more. ‘There’s a proper laundry now in the loft, there’s even a door that opens onto the roof with a clothes line.’

 

Nick blinked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’ He didn’t mean to sound sceptical but he didn’t remember that being anywhere on the original plans.

 

‘We did some improvising,’ Adalind admitted. ‘They pushed out further onto the roof so we could have more parking space in the garage.’

 

‘Huh.’ Thinking he’d have to investigate this development later, Nick fetched his bloody clothes from the laundry basket – Diana’s not so bloody ones too – and handed them over to Adalind, who didn’t even flinch at the prospect of getting blood on her hands.

 

‘I’ll take your mother to the airport after this,’ Adalind said. ‘What are you going to do?’

 

‘Pick up the surveillance on Bonaparte if I can,’ he told her. ‘I know Renard said not to come in to work but Hank and I still have that case open, the one with the wesen torn to pieces that has ties to Black Claw.’

 

‘Hank and Wu can handle that,’ Adalind said with complete confidence in their abilities. ‘Bonaparte needs to be stopped.’

 

‘I know,’ Nick murmured. ‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to stop him when my mom couldn’t even keep track of him.’

 

‘You’re not your mom,’ Adalind told him, ‘you know this city better than she does and if all else fails you could probably talk your way into the room he’s allegedly staying in with your badge.’

 

‘I suppose,’ Nick conceded. ‘At least then we’d know if he’s staying there at all. Mom doesn’t seem to think he is but someone must be, there’s no other reason for him to keep visiting that hotel.’

 

‘None that we know of,’ Adalind corrected. ‘Maybe that’s where you should start. Use that detective brain of yours to find out why that particular hotel.’

 

Nick nodded slowly, seeing the wisdom in her advice. His mother didn’t have access to the kind of resources that could tell her what was so significant about at that particular hotel but Nick did. Maybe something about the hotel, about the guests or its location could be tied to Black Claw and Bonaparte which would explain, not only why he was there but where he was going afterward and just how he was getting there without his mother being any wiser.

 

‘I should get started on that.’

 

‘Yes,’ Adalind agreed. ‘Don’t forget to say goodbye to you mother before you go.’

 

His turn to be amused, Nick left Adalind to deal with the bloody clothes, collected up his gun and badge again and moved to the kitchen where his mother and Diana were hastily doing the dishes before they lost the water. He dropped a kiss on Diana’s head and shared a look with his mother.

 

‘Be safe,’ he told her. ‘Check-in regularly.’

 

‘I’ll be fine, Nicky,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, you don’t have to worry about me.’

 

Nick snorted. ‘I’m going to worry. Don’t tell me you don’t worry about me?’

 

She smiled, conceding his point and offering her own, ‘Be safe.’

 

Nick had done his fair share of stakeouts, both back when he was in uniform and as a detective, he wasn’t above sitting in his car for hours on end watching and waiting for a suspect to appear. The problem where Bonaparte was concerned was that staking out the hotel was all his mother had been doing and it had gotten her nowhere. Adalind was right, he needed to look at this as a cop and not a Grimm for once. With that in mind, Nick drove to work instead of the hotel where he’d just be picking up Bonaparte’s trail from the man Kenneth had tasked with helping his mother.

 

That hadn’t gone down well to start and, though Nick wasn’t sure of the details, in the end the two had agreed to work with each other for as long as it was necessary to watch Bonaparte round the clock.

 

‘Hey,’ Hank greeted when he walked into the precinct to take a seat at his desk. ‘I though the captain told you not to bother coming in?’

 

‘He did,’ Nick said. ‘But Adalind pointed out we’ve had surveillance on Bonaparte for days and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. I need to know more about the hotel. Who owns it? Who stays there? Anything that might tell us why Bonaparte keeps going back there when he doesn’t appear to be staying there.’

 

Hank nodded. ‘So, approach it like any other case.’

 

Nick nodded. ‘Like a cop, not a Grimm.’ He typed the name of the hotel in the search bar and waited for the results to turn out telling him who owned the place. While he waited or the page to load he asked Hank about the double homicide.

 

‘Real estate,’ Hank told him. ‘We can’t find the connection to Black Claw yet but it’s looking like real estate was the motive.’

 

Nick frowned. ‘The same company that bought up all the land around them wanted to buy them out and that was worth tearing them apart?’

 

Hank gave him a look. ‘We haven’t met with the real estate developer yet but if you’ve got time when he comes in to see if he’s wesen that might clear things up.’

 

Nick nodded but the results of his search on the hotel were finally loaded and they proved distracting. ‘The hotel Bonaparte keeps disappearing into used to be owned by the Dobrini family.’

 

‘The hexenbiest Fuentes killed in the secret library/lab?’ Hank asked, sliding his chair around a little so he could see what Nick was looking at. ‘Huh.’

 

‘That can’t be a coincidence.’

 

‘Since when do we believe in coincidences?’ Wu asked, stepping up beside them. ‘What are we looking at.’

 

‘Ownership of the hotel Bonaparte keeps vanishing into,’ Nick answered. ‘It isn’t anymore, but about fifty years ago it was owned by the Dobrini family.’

 

‘Huh,’ Wu said. ‘Small world.’

 

‘I wonder what other property the Dobrini family used to own in this city?’

 

That wasn’t a quick search by any means, it turned up a long list of properties, some that were in the family for generations, some that, like the old enormous manor, had only been theirs for a handful of years or even months in some cases. He had Hank and Wu’s full attention now, as they studied the extensive list of properties the new search had spat out.

 

‘That’s not a small list,’ Wu remarked.

 

‘We need to narrow it down,’ Nick stated the obvious. ‘We know Bonaparte is interested in the hotel and that Black Claw were at the manor, they’re not exactly small and cheap properties.’

 

‘They’re all big enough to hide a treasure haul, though,’ Hank pointed out. ‘Maybe Bonaparte’s still looking for his treasure.’

 

Nick removed properties from the list that were small family homes or small businesses in established buildings and was left with a list of twenty-nine properties that were potential places to run into Bonaparte. If he was lucky, Bonaparte would be staying at one of those locations – though it was a long shot at best. What was more likely was that, if Nick could narrow down the list of properties to ones Bonaparte hadn’t been and then set a trap.

 

There had to be somewhere on this list that was out of the way, low on security but would be the perfect place to lure Bonaparte into a trap. Nick didn’t know exactly what Bonaparte was looking for but that didn’t mean he could make some educated guesses and fake it. Luring the powerful zauberbiest into a trap where he could control the environment was much more likely to work in their favour. Not to mention if they did set a trap then he could have Monroe, Rosalee, Hank and Wu on site to help, Renard as well if his offer to help was genuine and Nick thought it was.

 

Suddenly, taking out Bonaparte seemed a lot more realistic and less of an abstract dream. It would take time to check out all twenty-nine of the properties on the list but that was one advantage they had for staying in Portland to take out their target. Between them, Nick knew he, Monroe and Rosalee could get through the list of buildings quickly enough, the trick would be to identify whether or not Bonaparte had been there, was there or ever even planning to be there.

 

Just because the hotel had once been owned by the Dobrini family didn’t mean that was why Bonaparte was disappearing inside, it was just that Wu was right, they didn’t believe in coincidences any more and a high-ranking member of Black Claw disappearing into a building that had once been owned by the family of a woman they had specifically targeted was too suspicious to ignore.

 

Taking down Bonaparte really was starting to look possible.


	42. Chapter 39

a/n: I’m sorry! I feel like I fell off the face of the earth! Two weeks without internet – one of which I was sick. Do you know how much it sucks being sick when you can’t sprawl on the couch binge watching the crappy shows on Netflix you’d never let yourself watch normally? And then – then! – we may have had internet but I injured my shoulder at barre and I had to put together food and treats for the 40+ people attending my sister’s baby shower while work was being shit. I am so sorry for the delay posting!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 39

They split the list of properties owned by the Dobrini family in half. It was still a lot of properties Nick had to check in a short amount of time but it was the best lead they had. Still, splitting the list between them meant they were relying on Monroe and Rosalee’s ability to talk themselves into some places where Nick might have been able to smooth the way with his badge. He wasn’t doubting his friends would come up with something but it certainly slowed the process down.

The first property on Nick’s list was a bed and breakfast. It hadn’t always been one, that had happened years after the Dobrini family had sold the property and moved on, but it was big, it was old and the house gave off a certain vibe when Nick pulled up that suggested it definitely fit with the type of properties the Dobrini family tended to acquire.

The man behind the check-in desk became flustered when Nick flashed the picture of Bonaparte at him followed shortly by his badge but he took his time looking at the picture and nodded after a moment of consideration.

‘Yes, he was a guest here,’ he told Nick. ‘He only stayed the one night, though I’m not even sure why he bothered.’

Nick frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t think he slept a wink all night,’ the man told Nick. ‘He spent most of his time in our small reading corner.’

While it sounded strange, it wasn’t the strangest thing Nick had heard. ‘Did he ask you any odd questions?’

‘Why would you ask that?’ the man asked but then, before Nick could respond, added, ‘You know, he did want to know about the building’s history. He asked if we’d found any secret passageways in the old walls.’ The man smiled. ‘We get that question a lot – mostly kids though, it’s that kind of house.’

Nick thanked the man and left, feeling like his hunch may not have been so farfetched. Bonaparte had been to the property and he’d been looking for something similar to what they’d found under the secret lab/study. The question, of course, was whether or not Nick and his friends had found the item Bonaparte was so clearly looking for or if there was another stash of treasure hidden away by the Dobrini family.

As he drove to the next address on his list, it occurred to Nick that the Dobrini family might not be the only family with a hidden treasure trove of Grimm paraphernalia. When Adalind had been looking into the wesen who worshipped Grimms (thankfully rare) and the ones who worked for and used the circle to call on Grimms (still rare), she hadn’t found evidence to suggest it was just one family of wesen protecting that secret. The Dobrini family were simply a line of hexenbiests (and zauberbiests) who had once guarded the secrets of Grimms closely – at least that was the impression the treasure trove gave him. The Dobrini’s certainly didn’t follow that path anymore, not if the current heir didn’t even know about any treasure or secret room – because if he’d known, the kind of man he was, there was no way he wouldn’t have sold it all off and claimed the money for his own.

What was to say there weren’t other families out there, other types of wesen even, whose ancestors had once worked closely with the Grimms, who had once been, like the Dobrini family, trusted to care for the treasure looted from jobs and taken as payment? Who was to say they were even in Portland? They could be all over the world, these secret hidden stashes of treasure that overflowed with the history of Nick’s ancestors.

It seemed strange that Bonaparte was focusing on Portland, perhaps he knew something Nick didn’t but if he’d truly come looking for a specific Grimm relic it at east explained why Black Claw had made moves to claim Portland. If there was something in the city Bonaparte needed then it made sense to clear out those who might oppose him first.

Though, that in itself, seemed stupid to Nick. If he were trying to find something important in the city, he wouldn’t have made his presence known at all. Surely, if he’d avoided bringing Black Claw to attention in Portland, then they wouldn’t have needed to bring HW to Portland and Nick would have remained wholly unaware that there was even a problem which would then have given Bonaparte all the time he needed to search the city for, well, whatever it was he was looking for.

Nick wished they knew just what Black Claw and this secret society really wanted, not just from the Grimm treasure but in general. It seemed a strange and risky business venture, exposing wesen. Surely there was more money to be made, more power to be held, when no one knew the truth?

But what did he know?

The second, third and fourth addresses on his list weren’t nearly as much help. The second was a house where the housekeeper informed him she had never seen Bonaparte before and she was the only one currently in residence (she actually used those words) because the family she worked for were overseas in Japan where they lived six months out of every year. She did tell him that the house wasn’t the original one to sit on the land – that one had been torn down fifteen years ago when Kendall Wight bought the property.

‘Mrs Wight, didn’t like the ugliness of the old house,’ the housekeeper explained with a roll of her eyes.

The third address was a vacant lot with a big sign advertising the apartment block that would soon be built and the fourth was a packaging warehouse, business in full swing, where the site manager had never seen Bonaparte before and could tell him with absolute certainty that there were no secret rooms or tunnels in the warehouse.

The fifth address on his list was the same story as the first, the sixth Nick finally hit on something new.

‘I don’t know about your guy there,’ the woman wearing the hardhat and holding a nail gun told him, ‘but Grant and I found all sorts of weird shit under the floors when we started the renovations.’

‘What kind of “weird shit”?’ Nick asked.

‘Come take a look.’ The hardhat wearing woman – Sophie – put down the nail gun she’d been wielding when she answered his knock on the door. She led him through the gutted remains of the sprawling manor she and her husband Grant were in the process of renovating (though she’d assured him it was actually a restoration) to the trailer she and her husband were living in on the back of the property while they fixed up the house.

Inside the trailer, Sophie shifted a few boxes around until she pulled out the one she was looking for. She pulled off the lid and then nudged the box across the tiny gap of hallway between them. Nick peered inside the box and was unsurprised to find half a dozen books wrapped in plastic to protect them.

‘They were under the old floorboards in the attic,’ she explained. ‘Grant thought they might have some value but when we looked through them, they turned out to be journals – of a crazy person.’

Nick reached for the books and then paused, looking up at Sophie for permission. When she nodded, he reached into the box and picked up one of the books, carefully pulling it free of the plastic. It wasn’t like any of the Grimm books he’d encountered before and that was exactly why Sophie hadn’t seen the value in them. They weren’t huge leather bound tomes, they were cheap plastic covered diaries, the kind you might give a tween girl. One of them had a sparkly blue cover, another purple with gold stars.

Inside, though, they were every bit like his Grimm books. Notes on different wesen, sketches too, but where the books he’d gotten from Aunt Marie were filled with names, dates with facts and anecdotes, these ones were filled with confusion and fear. They were the thoughts and observations of a young Grimm who had no idea what they were seeing.

‘You’re welcome to ‘em,’ Sophie told him, waving a hand at the whole box. ‘We’d only throw them when we got around to it.’

‘You sure?’ When Sophie nodded her assurance that she was serious, Nick pulled out his card and handed it to her. ‘If the man comes by or anyone strange starts asking questions, feel free to call me.’

She took the card. ‘You got it.’

That visit set the tone for the rest of them. Address number seven was a large family home, not as old as some of the other properties on the list but old enough that it was starting to show its age – outside at least. At some point the bathrooms and kitchen had been updated but for the most part the house was just as it would have been when the Dobrini family owned it in the 1900s.

‘My grandparents bought it after the war,’ Lucas Drake told him, leading Nick through to the back of the house. ‘Grandad wanted a change of scene so he and Grandma left England and came here. What you’re looking for is down here.’

Drake, a middle-aged man juggling a baby, a bottle of formula and a toddler, motioned to what Nick discovered (after he opened it) was the door down to the basement. Drake nudged the light switch with an elbow and led the way down, taking each step down carefully but like someone who had done the same walk a million times before – at least three quarters with arms full of kids.

At the base of the stairs, Drake turned away from the well-lit washer and dryer to the darker corner under the stairs. ‘There used to be a light but the globe blew and honestly I haven’t had time to replace it,’ he apologised.

Undaunted, Nick pulled his flashlight out of his pocket and shined it into the darkness under the stairs. It took a moment for Nick to see what Drake was talking about but then he saw it. Pressed into the floor, cement carefully shaped around it, was an old and rusty metal safe. The old-fashioned combination lock and handle were flaked with rust and there was a properly established spider web between the handle and the door.

‘We could never get it open,’ Drake shrugged. ‘Maybe a Grimm will have better luck.’

Nick turned back to Drake in surprise, the man hadn’t woged or given any sign he knew Nick was a Grimm. There was usually a lot more fear when that fact came out, even after so many years of building up an entirely different reputation for himself. Nick definitely hadn’t been received so calmly when there were children involved.

Drake shrugged and offered, ‘I’ve done some work with Bud,’ by way of explanation.

Nick nodded and turned back to the safe. ‘I don’t think it’s a Grimm it needs.’ He pulled out his cell phone and called Adalind.

‘Hi, Daddy!’ Diana answered after the fourth ring.

Nick smiled. ‘Hey, kiddo, where’s Mom?’

‘She’s talking to Mr Ron about the bathroom.’

‘Oh.’ Nick thought about asking which bathroom but decided he didn’t really want to know. ‘I need her help opening something, can you get her, please?’

‘Yep!’

While he listened to Diana race through the loft he turned back to ask Drake if he knew how long the safe had been in the house and found the man giving him a strange look. ‘What?’

‘I knew you were a different kind of Grimm – Bud wouldn’t lie about that – but I thought he was exaggerating when he said you’d married a hexenbiest.’

Nick didn’t have a response to that. Drake seemed to have moved from cautious respect to genuine approval so he just nodded and asked his question.

‘As far as my family has been able to tell, the safe was put in when the original house was built – back in the 1730s.’

Nick frowned down at the door. ‘That safe is younger than that, combination locks like that only started popping up after 1910.’

‘Yes,’ Drake agreed. ‘Grandad thinks the safe was updated right before he bought the house – maybe even more than once as the house has been rebuilt twice. The previous owners put in a new safe but there’s been one there as long as the house has been here.’

In his hand, Diana called, ‘Bye, Daddy!’ from his phone and then Adalind was there.

‘Nick?’

‘Hey,’ he greeted in return before explaining the situation. ‘Any ideas?’ Then, before she could suggest she come to him and sort the problem out herself, he added, ‘That I can do here without you?’

There was a moment as Adalind contemplated his request. He didn’t think she was particularly perturbed by his demand she stay safely out of the way. She wasn’t about to risk the safety of their unborn child unless she absolutely had no other choice. Instead, she seemed to be contemplating what he could possibly do without a hexenbiest to do the work.

Eventually, she came up with, ‘Spit on the handle.’

‘Uh, what?’

‘Spit on it,’ she repeated, and there was a hint of amusement in her voice now. ‘I think this one will be about intent more than the door in the treasure room.’

‘I’m still not a hexenbiest,’ he pointed out, rather unnecessarily.

‘But you love one – two actually – and have possibly fathered a third,’ Adalind explained. ‘I think we can use that here. Think about your family and spit on it. Maybe rub your wedding ring while you’re at it.’

Eyeing the safe dubiously, Nick wedged his phone between ear and shoulder, rubbed his wedding ring and thought hard about the two hexenbiests in his life and then spat on the safe. He was more surprised than anyone when the door of the safe crumbled away.

‘Huh,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ Adalind told him smugly.

Drake peered over his shoulder at the now gaping hole in his floor. Nick’s flashlight flooded the interior of the safe and they both looked at the contents with interest. Sitting on top of a pile of Grimm books was and open box filled with large gold coins and a single iron key. Nick didn’t need to pick up the coins to know they were real gold. He reached in took the key from the box and then handed the open box of gold to Drake before realising the man didn’t have a hand free to grab it.

‘I think this belongs to you,’ he offered, carefully placing the box aside.

Drake goggled at the box of gold. ‘That’s a lot of money,’ he managed to choke out.

Nick nodded. ‘Mind if I take the books and the key?’

Drake nodded, still staring at the box of gold. ‘Take them.’ He hesitated for a moment before asking, ‘Are you sure I can keep them?’

Nick nodded, ‘They’re all yours.’

Nick left his card with Drake and took the books and the key back to his car. The books were far more valuable (in appearance) than the other books he’d retrieved and he wasn’t about to leave the key lying around, so Nick headed back to the Spice Shop. It seemed like a good enough reason to pause for lunch and to check in with Monroe and Rosalee.

‘Man,’ Monroe said when Nick called to suggest they break for lunch, ‘we’ve found some really weird stuff.’

‘Any sign of Bonaparte?’

Nick could picture Monroe shaking his head. ‘A couple of sightings but nothing real.’

‘Alright, well I’m thirty minutes away.’

‘See you soon.’

Nick ended the call with Monroe and pulled away from the curb. He’d made the drive to the shop so often that his mind wasn’t really on the drive, instead he was thinking about the fact that two of the houses on his list had secret stashes of Grimm books and what that meant for the houses on the rest of his list and on Monroe and Rosalee’s. What exactly had Monroe meant by “weird stuff”?

Just because his mind wasn’t particularly focused on the drive didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of his surroundings. That didn’t mean it didn’t take him by surprise when a naked man ran out in front of him. Nick slammed on the breaks, narrowly avoiding the man. For a moment, they locked eyes and then the man winked.

After that, things happened kind of quickly. Something slammed into the door beside him, shattering the window and showering him with glass. Before he’d had a chance to process that, the door was pulled off its hinges and tossed aside and large hairy hands were reaching into the car to pull Nick out. Nick managed to get his hand around the knife Adalind had long ago tucked between the seat and the centre console before he was forcibly removed from the car. He landed hard on the road, tyres squealing and horns blaring as cars broke and swerved around him.

He still had his grip on the knife and as he blinked rapidly to clear his vision things started to come into focus. The naked man was nowhere to be seen but that wink told Nick all he needed to know. He’d been a distraction, a reason to stop so that the seigbarste could pull Nick from the car when he came to a stop.

Nick didn’t think he had anything in his stash that could help him take down a seigbarste, though it wasn’t like he wouldn’t try. The monstrously large wesen bore down on him and Nick scrambled to his feet, eager to put as much space between them as possible. He hadn’t forgotten the last time he went a round with a seigbarste – he was sure there was still an imprint of that beating on a few of his ribs.

As he scrambled to his feet and away from the wesen, his eyes darted around, taking in as much about his surroundings as possible. They weren’t in an abandoned corner of Portland with no witnesses and no one to get hurt. They were on a reasonably busy street, a shopping strip, in the middle of a decent-sized neighbourhood. People were constantly turning the corner onto the street, cars were trying to make the turn and the sound of squealing breaks, swearing and screaming – lots of screaming was filling the air.

Nick ducked under a swipe that might have taken his head clean off and lunged forward to bury his knife under the seigbarste’s ribs. The knife slid in – not as far as Nick would have like – but it didn’t even cause the seigbarste a moment of pause. Nick lurched backward but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid the next blow and as he hit the pavement this time something in his arm made a sharp crack that sent a jolt of agony up his entire left arm.

Ignoring the pain, he pushed to his feet and charged. The seigbarste smiled (probably at Nick’s apparent stupidity) but Nick wasn’t aiming for him, at the last moment he ducked right, slipping behind the wesen and onto the sidewalk. The seigbarste was big but it wasn’t all that slow and just as Nick’s hands closed around the broken piece of sandwich board lying partially under the remains of his car door a hand closed around the back of his jacket and yanked him back into the street.

Nick didn’t release his grip on the wood, instead, he spun it in his hands and rammed the jagged edge behind him, hoping to make contact. There was a grunt that was more surprise than pain and Nick found himself once again weaponless, lying on his back with the seigbarste standing over him. What was new was the sound of sirens coming closer.

As much as Nick wanted help, the seigbarste would make short work of any cop that turned up to help. Though, he seemed content to ignore the other people on the street – most of whom, Nick could see, had fled the street to take shelter in the stores or just generally run away.

With no one around to get caught in the (ineffectual) crossfire, Nick scooted back, unclipping his gun from its holster. With a snarl, the seigbarste leant over him, grabbed the front of his jacket, lifted him off the ground and punched him in the face. His vision turned black around the edges and white hot pain roared across his face – it was a miracle that first blow broke nothing more than his nose.

With blood flowing down the back of his throat and down his chin, Nick did his best to aim and pulled the trigger. The seigbarste stumbled back, momentum more than pain driving the movement and Nick fired again and again and again until the seigbarste had stumbled back far enough with the impact that Nick could finally get back to his feet. Never taking his eyes off the seigbarste he spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground and then fired another two shots directly at the wesen’s face.

The shots were about as effectual as a spit ball but it was all Nick had on him. He scrambled in his pocket for his phone and fired again to keep the seigbarste distracted. The screen of his phone was shattered but he was lucky to find it still worked well enough to turn on. He fired again, pressing at his phone from memory alone, not daring to take his eyes off the monster doing a decent job of killing him.

He heard the sound of a call connecting just as the seigbarste had enough of the gun spitting bullets pointlessly slapping against his skin – bruises weren’t much of an inconvenience really – and he managed to shout just one word – seigbarste – before the seigbarste slammed into him, knocking the phone out of his grasp and carrying him back to the ground. This time, the cracking was the sound of ribs breaking and Nick wasn’t ashamed to admit he cried out in pain, he also wasn’t ashamed to admit that he turned his head and clamped his teeth on the seigbarste’s ear.

It didn’t taste nice, nor did it seem to have much of an effect on the wesen who drew back and drove his fist into Nick’s stomach hard enough that blood burst from his mouth, spattering across the seigbarste’s face and neck.

There was the sound of a car door slamming, running feet and Nick had a fleeting moment to worry that the police had finally arrived when there was a very familiar growl and Monroe slammed into the seigbarste, carrying him off Nick and onto the ground. Nick scrambled away, attempted to stand but found the world spinning wildly. The pain of his knees hitting the road didn’t even register and he didn’t dare shake his head as though to clear it.

He heard a grunt of pain that was definitely Monroe and that drove him to try again to stand. He wanted to run, he wanted to walk away from the fight but he couldn’t leave Monroe, couldn’t leave the seigbarste in the middle of what was normally a crowded street.

When he turned on unsteady feet he saw Monroe on his back with the seigbarste over him, big hands gripping his shoulder as he shook him vigorously. Nick did what any insane person would do and launched himself onto the seigbarste’s back, wrapping his arms around the wesen’s neck and attempting to pull back in the hopes the seigbarste would leave his friend alone.

Nick was stronger than he’d been the last time he faced a seigbarste and though it wasn’t enough to cause any lasting damage, it was enough to throw the seigbarste off balance long enough for Monroe to scrambled out from under him. Monroe roared, driving both fists into the seigbarste’s chest but the cracking sound Nick heard wasn’t any of the seigbarste’s ribs breaking and Monroe’s pained whine wasn’t a good sign.

Nick refused to let go and the seigbarste stood, taking him with. Awkwardly, Nick scrambled to place his feet against the seigbarste’s lower back. Pressing his feet against the wesen’s back, he yanked his arms back, trying to use his own body weight to wrench the seigbarste’s head back. It didn’t work, the seigbarste merely grunted, hunched forward and sent Nick tumbling over the seigbarste’s head back onto the ground, narrowly missing Monroe.

Only an awkward last minute twist saved Nick’s knees from hitting the road but the sharp pain that roared up both shins didn’t seem like much of a consolation. Still, it put Nick close enough that he tried to kick the seigbarste in the balls.

That got a reaction, though possibly not the one Nick would have liked. Howling in pain, the seigbarste flung Nick away. Flung him right into the side of his car, destroying both windows on the passenger side and crumpling the door panels. Nick slumped to the ground, struggling to catch his breath, struggling to focus his eyes on the real world and not the random bursts of light and static his beat-up brain was firing at him.

This would have been a really good time for his body to go into that cold, near-dead state that killed everything but whether it was all the pain or something else, that state wasn’t coming on and Nick had to force himself once more to his feet. There were more weapons in the car and he took a chance that Monroe could keep the seigbarste occupied long enough to get to them.

Of course, the impact of his body jammed the doors and he wasn’t in any state to reach in or crawl through a window. He thought he heard Rosalee yelling something and he realised she and Monroe had arrived together. He chanced a glance in the direction of her voice and saw her huddled against the side of a police car, arguing fervently with two uniformed cops.

Then a large hand grabbed him and slammed him face first into the car and he blacked out for a moment. He came to precious seconds later slumped awkwardly face first against the car. Monroe howling in pain and Rosalee screaming. Nick rolled away from the car to see that Rosalee had joined the fight and she’d done it with a knife.

While the seigbarste pummelled Monroe with his fists, Rosalee stabbed him again and again in the back. Nick tried to stand and it took him three attempts. On the third, he staggered forward just in time to watch the seigbarste grip Rosalee and toss her carelessly from his back. She hit the police car she’d previously been hiding behind with a pained cry and though she tried to get back up and join the fight, the two uniformed officers dragged her back behind the car.

Moments later, Monroe followed, his back slammed into the windshield, busting it in. Monroe groaned feebly but didn’t get up. One of the cops reached up and with Rosalee’s help slid Monroe behind the car and out of the seigbarste’s grasp. The second officer, fired four shots into the seigbarste’s chest. Nick couldn’t see the expression on the uniform’s face but he imagined it was terror when the seigbarste barely noticed the bullets slamming into his chest.

‘That all you got, Grimm?’ the seigbarste spoke for the first time, his words a deep mocking rumble.

He was broken, he hurt in more places than he wanted to admit and his head was ringing from the number of times it had slammed into the road but he wasn’t about to give up. Not when he didn’t know what the seigbarste had planned, not when he didn’t know why the wesen had attacked him in the first place. Was it Black Claw? Was it revenge for the last time Nick had gone up against a seigbarste? Had he finally gotten too close to the thing Bonaparte was searching for? If he killed Nick would he stop? Would he turn and walk away or would he go after Monroe and Rosalee?

He couldn’t take that chance. Nick limped forward but movement behind the seigbarste drew his attention. Nick froze, heart seizing and stomach clenching in horror and then he smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, it was actually kind of feral, teeth stained as they were with blood, the bruises and swelling painting a rather macabre image of his face. The seigbarste frowned.

‘No,’ Nick told him, the words making his jaw ache even as he felt cautious hope swell inside him. ‘That’s not all I’ve got.’

The seigbarste laughed again at what he saw as Nick’s pointless bravado. The monster took a step forward and then a sound more terrifying than anything else split the air.

‘Hey!’ Adalind shouted, that one word filled with more rage than a normal person could manage to put into a full sentence.

The seigbarste spun around, amusement still clear on his face, not realising there was anything to be afraid of, not realising that you should never threaten someone a hexenbiest loves. Definitely not realising you shouldn’t threaten the husband of a pregnant hexenbiest. The seigbarste took a laughing step toward Adalind, his back to Nick as though he was no threat – which, to be honest, right then he really wasn’t.

‘This?’ the seigbarste laughed, the sound like gravel rolling around in a mixer. ‘This is what you’ve got?’

Adalind woged, blonde hair turning to silver, gnarled hands gripping a very specific gun. ‘Stay the hell away from my husband!’

She pulled the trigger.

The seigbaste was still grinning when he dropped like a stone and Nick had a nice moment to appreciate the fact that he had married one seriously bad ass woman before he let go of consciousness and drifted into the darkness.


	43. Chapter 40

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the kudos! There's just one chapter left and an epilogue before I say goodbye to this fic.

a/n: This chapter is dedicated to my guest reviewers. You leave such amazing reviews that I wish I could thank each and every one of you for. Quick note that some of you may have missed last week’s update (chapter 39) because the alerts weren’t working well when I posted. Just one more chapter and an epilogue after this!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 40

The first thing he became aware of once he’d managed to form something like coherent thought, was the distinct lack of pain. Naturally, he had a moment of panic where he worried he was dead but then someone small and blonde poked him and he realised there was still pain, it was just mercifully dulled by a lot of good pain meds. He blinked his eyes open to the sound of Adalind scolding Diana for poking him where he hurt.

He squinted through fluorescent lighting so painful it could only mean he was in a hospital and tried to focus on Adalind who was standing beside his bed and Diana who was kneeling on his bed, leaning over him and staring intently down at him as though if she looked hard enough she could make him wake up. He wasn’t entirely convinced the stare hadn’t done it.

‘Hey.’

‘Daddy!’ Diana made to lunge forward to hug him but mercifully Adalind managed her own lunge and caught her before she could pounce on him.

‘He’s hurt remember,’ Adalind reminded her. ‘We have to be gentle – like this.’ Adalind leant forward and placed a soft kiss on his lips. When she pulled back their eyes met and he saw how worried she’d truly been. ‘Hey,’ she whispered, voice thick with emotion.

‘My turn!’ Diana demanded. She was gentle this time, gingerly crawling up the bed until she could place the softest of kisses right on Nick’s lips just as Adalind had done. It made him smile which didn’t pull on anything and he frowned – which also didn’t hurt.

He lifted a hand and felt his face but there didn’t seem to be any swelling. Odd, considering he remembered the crunch his nose had made when the seigbarste broke it. ‘How long was I out?’

‘About six hours,’ Adalind answered. She reached out and took his hand, pulling it away from his face. ‘I straightened out your nose before the ambulance arrived and its already healed.’

‘It’s what?’ Nick tried to sit up and all the pain he’d been ignoring thanks to the drugs flared through his chest and he bit back the yelp of pain so as not to worry Diana.

Adalind took the bed controls and slowly raised the bed so that he was sitting up. Diana helped her put another pillow behind his back. ‘You’re healing really fast,’ she explained. ‘Much faster than the last time you got hurt. Which I guess we should have expected given how quickly Josh healed from his injuries. Your nose is fine, the tooth you nearly lost is right back where it should be and all those bones you broke are now just small fractures. Your ribs got the worst of it.’

It definitely felt like they got the worst of it. Nick remembered all the blows he’d taken to his torso, all the times he’d hit the road (and the few time he’d hit his car) and he was surprised he didn’t feel worse – Grimm healing and all. He supposed it made sense, a Grimm couldn’t exactly go up against wesen with skills and gifts far stronger if there wasn’t something to compensate. Rapid healing was clearly his bodies way of dealing with people who could do some truly remarkable (and often destructive) things.

Which reminded Nick that his friends had come to help. ‘How’re Monroe and Rosalee?’

‘Rosalee has a broken collar bone and Monroe has some bruised ribs and a very bad concussion but they’re okay. They’re home – they wanted to stay but I wouldn’t let them.’

Nick nodded. He was glad his friends were okay, it seemed like once again they’d gotten hurt helping him. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe it was his fault, not like Juliette had once accused him. Monroe and Rosalee would have jumped in that fight for anyone, it was just unfortunate the wesen that attacked him was a seigbarste. Though hadn’t there been a second man?

‘There were two uniforms on scene,’ Nick remembered. ‘What happened?’

‘I called Sean,’ Adalind told him. ‘Once I explained what happened he got there pretty quick. He handled things until Hank and Wu arrived. We don’t know who the seigbarste was yet, we don’t know if he was Black Claw or a relative of the last one you encountered.’

‘There was a naked man,’ Nick said. ‘He ran out in front of my car, that’s why I stopped.’

‘That’s silly,’ Diana said. ‘Why was he naked?’ Now that he and Adalind were talking she’d sat back on the bed and shoved her feet up under his arm. She wasn’t wearing any shoes and so her sock covered toes were curling under his armpit. Nick barely noticed. After sharing a bed with her for the week before they had her room ready, he was used to being kicked, elbowed and tickled randomly.

‘It is silly,’ Adalind agreed, running her hand through Diana’s hair. ‘They were tricking your dad,’ she explained. ‘they wanted him to stop so that the seigbarste could hurt him.’

Diana frowned. ‘I’m glad you killed him. He was a bad man.’

‘He was a bad man,’ Adalind agreed. To Nick, she said, ‘Wu took a bunch of witness statements, there were a few people who saw the naked man and explained what happened. They haven’t found him yet but they’ve got security footage from and alley where he had a bag of clothes waiting.’

Nick nodded, he knew Hank and Wu would catch the guy and then they’d know why he’d been targeted. He drove through the area frequently enough but never at the same time and not every day or even on regular days. It was one of several convenient routes he took to the Spice Shop depending on which side of the city he was coming from. There was no way the seigbarste and his accomplice could have known he’d be there at that particular time unless he’d been followed but he didn’t remember seeing anyone following him, not at any of the properties on his list.

Thinking about the properties he’d visited reminded him of the books he’d taken, the books and the key. ‘There were books in my car,’ he told Adalind. ‘Did someone get them?’

Adalind nodded. ‘Wu and I went through your car – it’s wrecked so we had to empty it out. Does your insurance cover seigbarste attack?’ she mused.

The news that his car was wrecked was hard to hear but he shouldn’t have been surprised. Having the door ripped away, the side panels crumpled in and he thought there might have been some other damage though he couldn’t quite remember how it had happened. He’d loved his old Land Cruiser and he was sad to part with it but the truthfully it was a small price to pay for getting out alive. Besides, the safety rating on it wasn’t all that great. They could afford to get something a little (okay a lot) safer for the kids. There’d be times when he wouldn’t have Adalind’s car to drive them around in and it would be nice to have all the right clips and such for the car seat when the baby was born not to mention for Diana as well.

‘When can I get out of here?’

‘I’ll go find the doctor,’ Adalind offered. ‘You’re better off than they were expecting so hopefully they’ll let you go soon enough.’

She slipped out of the room leaving him with Diana. Whereas Adalind was terribly aware of just how bad things could have been he wasn’t sure Diana yet understood how close he’d come to being badly hurt – or killed. He looked at her and she looked back at him, her expression gravely serious.

‘You can’t die,’ she told him firmly.

‘Okay,’ he replied. ‘Can I have a hug?’

‘Mommy said I wasn’t supposed to hug you.’

‘Well, then we won’t tell her.’ He raised his arms and she eager scrambled up to give him a hug. She wasn’t gentle about it but he didn’t make a sound of protest. ‘Are you okay?’

She nodded into the side of his neck. ‘Mommy’s scary when people try to hurt you.’

Nick laughed – which hurt – and squeezed her tighter – which didn’t. ‘Yeah, she is.’

He probably should have been concerned that Diana, at such a young age, seemed to understand what death meant but she was hardly a normal little girl. Sometimes it was easy to forget how powerful she’d once been, sometimes it was easy to forget that she was just a year old. There were things she said and the ways she said them that suggested she hadn’t come away from being that super powerful hexenbiest wholly unscathed but they were things he and Adalind – and Renard – would need to address when she got older if they became more apparent or started to affect her.

They were lucky, in a way, that his mother had found a way to strip her of those powers and undo whatever changes Adalind’s quest to get her powers back had done. At least this way Diana could grow up normally, she might have jumped a head a little but she wouldn’t miss out on things as Adalind had originally feared when they’d realised how fast she was growing. She’d get to be a perfectly normal big sister, go to school like any other child. She’d be able to make friends without having to leave them behind when she rapidly outgrew them.

She’d be able to have a lot of things Adalind had feared she’d never have and for that, Nick could handle a few weird comments.

Adalind came back with the doctor and merely sighed when she saw Diana cuddled up to Nick’s side. The doctor asked him some questions, did the requisite poking and prodding and then agreed that he could go home.

‘You’ll need to take time off work and more on desk duty but there are no signs of concussion, no internal bleeding – I’d say you’re good to take him home, Mrs Burkhardt.’

Adalind smiled widely, Nick didn’t know if it was at the news he could go home or at being called “Mrs Burkhardt” but either way, Nick wasn’t complaining. He listened carefully to the doctor’s instructions and then let Adalind and Diana help him dress while they wanted on a nurse to come by with the paperwork and release forms. Diana insisted on doing up the buttons on his shirt so he was only just finishing up when the nurse arrived with the forms.

‘You can fill this at the pharmacy downstairs,’ he added, holding out a prescription for some painkillers.

‘Thanks,’ Nick said, already knowing as he took the script that he wouldn’t be needing it. At the rate he was healing, he expected he’d be good as new in just a few days. Well, good enough to be back at work and doing normal things.

‘No,’ Adalind said, like she could read his mind. ‘Tonight, we’re going home, you’re going to eat dinner and rest. Have a horribly early night and then tomorrow I will let you be stupid and do what needs to be done.’

‘That seems fair.’

Nick slid into the passenger seat of Adalind’s Range Rover while she helped buckle Diana into her car seat. ‘They think the loft will be finished in another week,’ Adalind told him when she pulled out of the hospital parking lot. He didn’t know if she was trying to distract him or genuinely wanted to talk about it but he didn’t mind.

‘That’s good. We can start furnishing the nursery and finish Diana’s bedroom.’

‘They should have the apartment downstairs done by then, too, but the Grimm room will be finished tomorrow.’

Nick grimaced. ‘We really need a better name for it, “Grimm room” sounds ridiculous.’

‘You come up with something and we’ll test it out.’

Nick pulled a face at her. ‘How much shopping do we need to do?’ he wondered. ‘We don’t have any furniture for the apartment and we’ll need at least a table and chairs for the,’ he hesitated and then offered, ‘library?’

Adalind shook her head. ‘Too normal. And I know but Josh is keen to take over the apartment and he said he’s got all the money from the sale of his house and what HW paid him before they turned him into a Grimm and he escaped. He says he’ll furnish the apartment.’

‘That works.’ Nick thought for a moment and then offered, ‘Archive?’

‘Better, still not great.’

‘Vault?’

‘Sounds too much like there’s money and gold.’

‘There was,’ Nick pointed out.

‘What about athenaeum?’

‘Is that even a word?’ Nick asked dubiously.

‘It means library,’ Adalind told him primly and then, getting into it, she added, ‘We could put that on the door. Wouldn’t it be cool if one day we created this amazing repository of Grimm knowledge that other Grimms actually came by Portland to use?’

Nick frowned. ‘Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of our home being off the grid?’

Adalind ignored him. ‘I like it. Athenaeum.’

‘It’s kind of a mouthful,’ Nick pointed out, though he wasn’t complaining. ‘Athenaeum,’ he said. ‘Diana, can you said Athenaeum.’

‘Athenaeum,’ she repeated perfectly, surprising him and Adalind.

Impressed, Nick said, ‘Guess that works.’

‘Good, it sounds much more impressive than “Grimm room” or even the trailer.’

‘It’s a lot more convenient, too,’ Nick murmured. ‘If we hadn’t moved everything in there, you might not have gotten to me with the seigbarste gift in time.’

Adalind’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘I know. I’m so glad I could find it, we need to introduce some sort of order as soon as they finish with the…Athenaeum.’

‘Diana and I can do that between helping you with the baby,’ Nick said. ‘Can’t we Diana?’

Diana nodded and Adalind smiled, ‘Josh can help too. He did offer.’

‘And I will absolutely be taking him up on that offer.’

‘He said something about digitizing it, too.’

‘It’s not a bad idea,’ Nick agreed. ‘It would certainly be better if those other Grimms could just go online and look things up rather than intrude on our home.’

Adalind couldn’t argue with that and they passed the rest of the drive home talking about the things they need to buy to fill the new room in their loft and the new Athenaeum. Nick let Adalind fill the time with talk about guest towels and a rubber mat for the bottom of Diana’s tub (which Nick didn’t even know had been installed and connected) because he knew she needed it. She hadn’t said it and she wouldn’t say it in front of Diana but he’d scared her, she’d been terrified of losing him and if she needed to have simple and boring conversation about perfectly ordinary things to remind herself that they would still be doing those perfectly normal thing together because he wasn’t dead then he would absolutely let her.

He didn’t want to leave her any more than she wanted him to leave. It hadn’t exactly been a wake-up call but it hadn’t been a great reminder of the reality of their world. There was still the fight against Bonaparte to come and Nick had no idea how that would go. He’d fought against Adalind before and Renard to a certain extent but it had been his mother who fought Catherine, who had ended her and so he didn’t know what he should expect from a fight with Bonaparte. He wasn’t even sure he should be expecting a fight. Would the man fight his own battle or would he send someone in his place? Someone Nick would need to get around in order to find and stop Bonaparte?

The zauberbiest had so far been approaching each of the properties he had targeted on his own – at least as far as any of the people he’d spoken to could tell. That had to mean the man himself could be trapped, that Nick could force Bonaparte into a confrontation with him surrounding himself with a dozen Black Claw members to help. Nick had to believe that, he had to believe that he could get Bonaparte on his own and that he was someone Nick could take down.

Monroe and Rosalee wouldn’t be able to help him, they didn’t heal fast enough. Nick would be relying on Hank and Wu to do what they could and Renard to offer as much assistance as he could – either as a police captain or a zauberbiest, Nick didn’t care which so long as they dealt with Bonaparte.

He might not have liked the idea but Nick knew Adalind was right to force him into having a quiet night. He ate a small dinner with his girls and then went to bed. He thought because it was still so early (barely eight o’clock) that he’d have trouble falling asleep but the moment his head hit the pillow he was out and he slept clear through until the next morning when he woke to the sound of Adalind hissing in pain.

He sat up immediately and let out his own pained hiss. His ribs still hurt and without the aid of painkillers he was feeling every ache and pain he’d been ignoring yesterday. His wrist hurt (he’d forgotten about it), his ribs ached whenever he breathed too deeply and despite the sleep he’d gotten he felt like he could easily fall back for another couple of hours. Apparently, his body had been burning away all night healing him up because he knew his aches were less than they’d been yesterday because while it hurt it didn’t hurt as much. He was starving hungry, though.

‘Nick,’ Adalind whispered through the dim grey of the room. ‘I think I just had a contraction.’

Being a cop (and a Grimm) Nick was trained to deal with surprises and to keep his head in a crisis. He didn’t think Adalind would appreciate him considering her first contraction a sign of impending crisis but he also thought the principal was basically the same. He didn’t panic, his mind didn’t go blank, he just nodded and reached for his phone, opening the appropriate app and making a note of the time (6:14AM).

‘You okay?’ he asked, easing back against the headboard and looking down at her.

‘Yeah,’ she assured him. ‘Just wasn’t expecting it.’

They sat there for a moment in the semi-darkness and let the realisation wash over them. Nick was the first to wrap his head around it. ‘Holy crap, we’re having a baby.’

‘We really are.’

‘This is really bad timing,’ Nick pointed out.

‘It was one contraction and it didn’t last very long,’ Adalind reasoned. ‘We’ve got time.’

‘Time for me to find what Bonaparte is looking for, set a trap and kill him?’ Nick didn’t bother to hide his scepticism.

‘Maybe,’ Adalind stated with all seriousness. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

Nick nodded. ‘Go have a shower, I’ll make it. What do you want?’

‘I don’t know, surprise me.’

As Adalind went off to shower, Nick went to start on breakfast, settling for eggs and toast because they didn’t have much else. He was surprised Diana wasn’t awake yet but he supposed yesterday had been a big day for her, woken early in the morning when Nick had been called away and then the excitement of him being attacked and in hospital, if Adalind was lucky, she’d sleep for another couple of hours. At least that way she could sleep through the early stages of Adalind’s labour. Neither of them knew what to expect from this one, everything about her pregnancy with Diana was sped up and wholly different so this would be a bit of a learning experience for both of them – sort of.

While he made breakfast, he considered everything he needed to do and how little time he now had to do it in. He hadn’t even gotten through his half of the list before the seigbarste attack and he knew Monroe and Rosalee hadn’t finished their either. He also didn’t know what the two had found and whether it was relevant to Bonaparte’s search or if it was more along the lines of what Nick had found, things only worth anything to a Grimm.

Though, depending on what the key led to, Nick supposed that might have been what Bonaparte was after. Then again, what did he really know, it could have been the sparkly tween diaries that held some secret he was desperate to get his hands on. Nick doubted it, because it didn’t seem especially likely but he couldn’t exactly rule it out either. They simply knew too little about Bonaparte and his plans for Black Claw and the society.

Nick couldn’t expect Monroe and Rosalee to help anymore, they’d done as much as they could, this would have to be up to Nick and perhaps Renard, now. Maybe Hank and Wu would be done with their case and could help. But help with what Nick still couldn’t be sure. He left messages for all three anyway, and another for Monroe and Rosalee suggesting thy meet early at the shop. Their window of opportunity was rapidly closing and they were still no closer to locating and stopping Bonaparte.

He hadn’t heard from his mother, not that he’d been expecting to just yet. There were no messages on his phone from Kenneth but he assumed anything the Royals did would be passed through Renard which went for Elizabeth too. He was expecting Henrietta to check in soon but he wouldn’t be worried if he didn’t hear from her. Meisner and Trubel would be coordinating the Grimms which didn’t really leave much for Nick to worry about. Just finding and stopping Bonaparte which he hadn’t yet been able to do. The one thing he’d been tasked with and he couldn’t do it.

‘You look mad.’ Diana’s voice startled him out of his thoughts and he turned to look down at her. She’d somehow managed to sneak right up to his side in the kitchen without him hearing her. His mind had clearly been focused on his own pity party. She was wearing the pale pink onesie with unicorns printed all over it that Adalind had helped her into the night before and she’d pushed her feet into equally ridiculous slippers that looked like wolves (Adalind bought them as a joke while shopping with Monroe).

She held her arms up in the universal request to be picked up.

‘I’m not mad,’ he told her, hoisting her up onto his hip before he stirred the eggs in the saucepan to stop them from sticking. ‘I’m just a little annoyed that I haven’t been able to find a very bad man.’

‘Maybe you should ask Mommy.’

Nick laughed. ‘I did ask Mom but it’s too dangerous for her to help me right now. We don’t want anything to happen to the baby.’

‘Oh.’

Nick’s phone rang then and he put down the spatula to pick it up. Caller ID said it was Monroe. He might have messaged his friends but he hadn’t expected them to be awake just yet. Though he supposed he really should have considered how much pain they were both probably in. Neither of them had his healing, they had to rely on good, old-fashioned pain pills.

‘I’m coming today,’ Monroe told him, without preamble. ‘Rosalee isn’t but my ribs aren’t nearly as bad as they thought and the concussion is gone.’

Rather than try to talk him out of it (which Nick knew would be pointless) Nick said, ‘Adalind had her first contraction this morning. Rosalee should come keep her company.’

‘The baby’s coming?’ Monroe asked and his voice carried through the phone in the quiet of the morning so that Diana jerked suddenly in Nick’s arms eliciting a hiss of pain from him when she jarred his ribs. Until then he’d been content to ignore the dull ache and the way breathing was still painful.

He put Diana down fast enough that it could have been mistaken for dropping her and even through her excitement she realised what she’d done because her smile dropped and her eyes welled with tears.

‘I’m okay,’ he told her. ‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.’ To Monroe (and Diana) he said, ‘It was one contraction, it’s going to be hours yet.’

‘But you want Bonaparte dealt with before the baby arrives.’

Nick nodded, even though Monroe couldn’t see him. ‘Yeah. I don’t want to miss the birth of my son for this guy, he’s not worth it.’

‘I get it, man. We can start on the rest of the addresses soon – I’d say let’s go now but I don’t think people are going to want to talk to us when it’s not even seven.’

‘Probably not,’ Nick admitted.

They only waited half an hour, with too much to do and such a short amount of time, they agreed it was worth the risk to annoy people so early. Most people were likely to be up and getting ready for work anyway. A couple of the properties on Monroe’s list were commercial so the chances of anyone being there depending on the hours the business operated. The last three properties Nick had to check were all residential – two in the city and one just outside the city. Nick would have chosen that one for their trap if he thought there was any chance Bonaparte would be stupid to try that address alone.

Something so far out, Nick imagined Bonaparte would take a driver and at least one man for security. It was likely he’d do that in the city limits too but if he had, they’d remained discreet to the point of going completely unnoticed by the people Nick had already interviewed.

Nick wouldn’t write that off as a possibility, not when he was fresh from a planned attack he hadn’t seen coming.

Monroe brought Rosalee to the loft so she could stay with Adalind and recuperate while keeping track of Adalind’s contractions. Nick hoped to have dealt with Bonaparte by then but he made Rosalee swear to call him the moment they started for the hospital. He wasn’t going to risk missing the birth.

He still kissed her goodbye a little too thoroughly but that was for her. As reluctant as he was to leave her while she was beginning her labour, Adalind didn’t want to watch him walk out of the loft with plans to seek out danger.

She would have been happy to know that properties one through five for the day were a perfectly safe bust. Not to say they didn’t get anything from them. They seem to be accumulating a nice stash of Grimm books and strange artefacts the more places they checked through. On the drive to the sixth property (one from Monroe’s list), Renard checked in to say that he’d cleared the one property he’d been to, noting Bonaparte had already been there.

Hank and Wu, Renard told Nick, were about to make and arrest and were up for tackling a couple of properties once they were done.

‘We’re running out of time,’ Renard said, rather unnecessarily, Nick thought. ‘Kenneth and my mother both checked in, they have their society members under careful surveillance and are ready to make their moves as soon as the clock runs out.’

‘I haven’t heard from anyone but Trubel ad she said roughly the same thing.’

‘I have to go,’ Renard said. ‘I’m getting another call.’

The seventh property they checked was nothing like the other properties the Dobrini family had owned. For a start, this one had no built structure on it. At first glance it looked like an empty block of land waiting for development. For all anyone knew, that was exactly what it was, a big block of land at the end of a cul-de-sac where an outdated house had been knocked down to make way for a much more modern home that would blend perfectly in with the houses surrounding it. Manicured lawns, expensive cars lignin the street where they didn’t fit into already full garages.

Nick would have turned away and ignored it if he hadn’t caught the reflection of the sun off something shiny and metallic in the middle of the property. That shiny metallic thing turned out to be the mostly covered door to an underground bunker. There was no apparent lock on the door, no clear way to keep unwanted visitors out, so all Nick had to do was reach out and open it.

He was expecting a ladder leading down into dark depths but instead he was presented with a set of concrete steps leading down into a room lit with the dull green glow Nick would forever associate with HW when it was under attack. He and Monroe exchanged looks before Nick drew his side arm and led the way carefully down the steps into the dimly lit room.

The steps ended in a circular room with a single corridor branching off to the right. The room itself contained nothing and so Nick cautiously started toward the corridor, Monroe right behind him. The corridor had a slight curve to it and several other corridors seemed to branch off from it. Continuing to follow the same slightly curved hallway led him directly to a dead end. They back tracked to the beginning and took the first turn they could. That led them into a dead end as well. As did the second corridor and the third. The fourth one seemed promising but after a series of turns slapped them straight up against another dead end.

‘A maze,’ Monroe mumbled unhappily. ‘A labyrinth!’

‘Let’s just hope there’s no minotaur waiting in the centre,’ Nick murmured.

Monroe snorted and the two continued on. Dead end, after dead end until Nick was starting to lose track of where they were and how they were supposed to get out. He was regretting the choice to venture down into the maze but something was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the search. Surely the Dobrini’s wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble if there weren’t something worth stealing at its centre? Or on the other side, Nick wasn’t fussy, so long as this crazy journey proved useful.

The further into the maze they moved the more on edge Nick became. He didn’t lower his gun and he knew Monroe could feel it because the blutbad was shifting awkwardly from foot to foot every time they paused to get their bearings. They weren’t talking anymore, conveying needs with a simple tap on the arm instead so as not to break the silence.

Nick was just beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t just call it quits when he rounded a corner and there was Bonaparte looking only slightly perturbed by the turn of events that was the maze.

Nick reacted without thought, finger squeezing the trigger.


	44. Chapter 41

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick confronts Bonaparte.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much fro sticking by me with this story. Just the epilogue to go!

Necessary Sins – Chapter 41

Bonaparte’s power slammed into him sending him crashing back into the tunnel wall and his shot went wide. Not wide enough to miss, not entirely, but enough that the bullet grazed the side of Bonaparte’s neck. Bonaparte seemed more surprised by his decision to shoot without first exchanging words than he did about the graze itself. He eyed Nick as though rethinking all he’d assumed about the Portland Grimm.

Nick, for his part, was pinned to the wall, struggling to breathe around the fresh ache in all his ribs. As much as they’d planned on finding and taking down Bonaparte, there’d always been that underlying question of just how they were going to manage it. Pinned to the wall, unable to move, Nick was considering the real possibility that they weren’t. Especially when Monroe lunged forward with a snarl only to end up pinned right beside Nick. The movement had been almost casual from Bonaparte, a lazy flick of the wrist and Monroe was pinned, teeth gnashing in a snarl but unable to do anything about it.

‘You surprise me.’ Bonaparte took a crisp white handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his neck as he spoke. His tone was conversational, not conveying any of the surprise he was speaking of. His expression had closed off too, the open emotion wiped clean like chalk from a slate.

‘How?’ Nick gasped out.

‘From all I have heard of the Portland Grimm I did not expect you to shoot before we discussed your options.’

‘What options?’ This time his words were more of a wheeze, he wasn’t sure that was much of an improvement.

‘It seems pointless, does it not, to fight when you could join me? Are you not, at heart, a member of the wesen community?’

Nick hadn’t ever thought of it that way, he supposed he was a member of the wesen community, he was their law enforcement as much as he was a normal cop. That didn’t mean he was buying what Bonaparte was trying to sell.

‘I’m not someone you can control,’ Nick ground out. ‘I’d be no use to you.’ As soon as he said the words, he regretted them, if he was no use to Bonaparte then there was no reason to keep him alive and he very much wanted to be alive.

‘No?’ Bonaparte examined the blood staining the handkerchief before pocketing it, his gaze lifting to Nick’s, a smile playing on his lips. It wasn’t a friendly smile, it was the kind of smile that scared Henrietta even now. ‘Perhaps. You do want something from me, do you not? As I want something from you.’

This confused Nick, Monroe too, judging by what Nick could see of his friend’s expression out of the corner of his eye. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’

Bonaparte smiled indulgently, ‘No?’ He raised his right hand and curled the fingers, turning his wrist in a half circle. Immediately Monroe cried out. ‘I think we’re beyond lies, Detective Burkhardt, don’t you?’

If there was something Nick could have said to stop Bonaparte from hurting Monroe he’d have said it, the problem was, he genuinely had no idea what Bonaparte was talking about. They didn’t want anything from him, unless you counted his death and the end of Black Claw and the secret society funding it.

‘What do you want?’ Nick demanded with as much force as he could muster, still pinned to the wall by a pressure that was slowly but surely turning those bruised ribs into fractured ones. If they kept this up, Nick was sure one of his ribs would puncture something important.

‘You know what I want,’ Bonaparte reminded him. ‘Black Claw will succeed in taking wesen to their rightful place among the people.’

Monroe snorted. It must have hurt him a lot to do it and his apparent insolence was rewarded with another twist of Bonaparte’s hand. ‘You…don’t…want that,’ he choked out.

‘I assure you, I have worked very hard to bring wesen the recognition and power they deserve.’

‘Liar,’ Nick said and his tone was conversational, not mocking or inciting. He was starting to see spots and the edge of his vision was blurring. ‘You couldn’t care less,’ he wheezed. ‘You’re not here looking for something because you want Black Claw to win, it,’ he broke off and sucked in a breath, ‘that doesn’t benefit you at all.’

‘On the contrary,’ Bonaparte informed him. ‘I very much want Black Claw to succeed.’

‘Lose…business,’ Monroe pointed out. ‘Money.’

Bonaparte waved his hand carelessly and, whether it was intentional or not, Monroe cried out in pain again. ‘I have plenty of money, what I do not have enough of is power.’

Nick wanted to roll his eyes and in doing so discovered that he could move the fingers still wrapped tightly around his gun. It wasn’t much good to him just yet, he’d only shoot Monroe if he managed to pull the trigger, but if he could break away from Bonaparte’s control enough to bring his hand up he might be able to get a shot off in the zauberbiest’s direction. That might be enough to distract him long enough to release his hold on Nick and Monroe. The best way to do it, was to keep the man talking.

‘This whole thing, all the deaths and the chaos is for power?’ Nick wasn’t sure if he was surprised or disgusted – probably both.

‘I am not sure a Grimm such as yourself would understand.’ Bonaparte seemed to consider something. ‘Though it is not, as far as I am aware, in the nature of a Grimm to become friends with wesen.’ He canted his head toward Monroe. ‘Perhaps you do seek power, there is power in the relationships you have built.’

Nick wasn’t sure he could respond to that. It was such a twisted way to look at the friendships he’d made. Yes, there was power in those relationships he’d made with the wesen community but it was the friendship he valued not the power it gave him. The power Bonaparte talked about wasn’t the kind he could wield but the kind that protected him, that gave him something to fight for. Nick wasn’t sure Bonaparte would ever understand that, he wasn’t sure if he even managed to adequately explain it, that the zauberbiest would be able to see the difference.

Nick didn’t seek power, he didn’t want it, the power he gained wasn’t even his alone, it was theirs. It wasn’t even power, not really, it was strength, strength from friendships, from the knowledge that they would risk a great deal to help each other, to save each other. If that was the kind of power Bonaparte sought he’d be looking for a long time. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who knew how to play well with others.

Nick moved another finger.

‘I don’t want power,’ Nick managed to grind out. ‘Just to stop you.’

Bonaparte laughed and it wasn’t a nice sound, it did contain genuine humour though, which was possibly worse. ‘You cannot stop me; you waste both of our time trying.’

Nick managed to move his whole hand, just a twitch but it was a start. ‘I will stop you but I want to know one thing before I do, what is it you think I want from you?’

This time Bonaparte seemed to believe him. He tilted his head, studying Nick thoughtfully. The intense gaze made Nick’s skin crawl and he was afraid to try any movement with Bonaparte scrutinising him so closely. The wait, while Bonaparte searched his expression and his body language for some hint of whatever he was looking for, was excruciating. The pain from his ribs had grown to a burning hot flame and he could hear Monroe’s ragged breathing as he struggled to stay conscious through his own pain.

It occurred to Nick that Rosalee was going to be incredibly mad to learn he’d gotten Monroe injured further. Of course, in order to be mad at him they had to get out of this maze of an underground structure alive.

The fact that it seemed to be costing Bonaparte nothing to hold them both in place only made things worse. He didn’t seem to be tiring, didn’t even seem to be truly focused on using his power to pin them to the wall. It was an afterthought, a subconscious act, and that alone should have been terrifying. He’d believed Henrietta when she’d said Bonaparte was powerful but he hadn’t understood just how powerful until now.

And then Nick felt it, he could move his hand, he wasn’t sure how or why but he wasn’t about to question it. There was no time to aim, no time for finesse, not with Bonaparte still studying him like a bug under a microscope. The zauberbiest didn’t seem to be finding what he was looking for in Nick’s expression but Nick was done waiting to find out what would happen when Bonaparte finally realised Nick had no value.

He jerked his wrist and squeezed the trigger. His aim was terrible, the bullet didn’t come close to hitting Bonaparte, skimming his side and barely ruffling his suit before it embedded in the opposite wall. That wasn’t the point though, in the moment the gun went off, Bonaparte flinched and he lost that subconscious control over both Nick and Monroe.

Monroe went low, aiming to tackle the man at the knees but he stepped casually aside and Monroe, weak and in pain, ploughed passed him. Which suited Nick just fine, he couldn’t use his gun without risking hitting Monroe but he lunged forward, both arms outstretched and shoved Bonaparte. The man stumbled back but he didn’t fall and Nick, in his weakened state, struggled to keep his balance and strike out again with his foot.

Bonaparte merely stepped aside, moving back into open corridor and straightened out his suit. ‘Really, Detective, I see no need for such violence. You will give me what I want, I will give you what you desire and we will both leave here without further injury.’

Apparently, whatever he’d seen while studying Nick hadn’t convinced him Nick wanted nothing from him. Nick didn’t bother dignifying that with a response. He swung at Bonaparte but missed when Bonaparte glided out of the way, neatly avoiding Nick’s blow and Monroe who swung an elbow at him.

He was moving too slow, Nick knew that, his injuries were putting him at a disadvantage, more so than Bonaparte’s power already did. He wasn’t going to defeat Bonaparte with brute force as he’d done so many of the assassins Black Claw, HW and the Royals had sent after him. For a moment (a really small moment) he wished Adalind were by his side instead of Monroe, he wished she were there to counter Bonaparte’s moves, to reason or bargain with him the way he was sure only a hexenbiest could.

But Adalind wasn’t and Nick didn’t see them getting away from Bonaparte any time soon, not unless he could figure out what it was the man thought he wanted from him and what it was Bonaparte wanted that he thought they had. It could be any one of the treasures they’d already found or something they’d yet to discover. There really was no way of knowing, not without asking, not without somehow making Bonaparte think he’d succeeded in wearing Nick down.

With no other immediate plan forming, Nick grabbed Monroe’s arm and eased his friend back into the dead end with him. ‘What do you want from me?’

Bonaparte smiled. ‘Ready to negotiate?’

‘I’m not ready to die down here.’

This time Bonaparte nodded. ‘A wise choice. You have a map in your possession, one that shows the location of an item of power for zauberbiests and hexenbiests long thought lost. You will hand it over and I will give you the book you have been searching for.’

Unaware he’d been searching for a book, especially one Bonaparte apparently had, Nick kept his face blank. It helped that as far as he was aware he didn’t have a map in his possession that lead to a secret hexenbiest treasure. At least, if he did, he didn’t know about it.

He wondered how long Bonaparte would keep him alive once he realised Nick and Monroe knew nothing about a map. Not unless it was one of the maps made from keys that he’d yet to put together. And if that was the case then Bonaparte was out of luck, even if Nick had been stupid enough to even consider handing something so apparently powerful over to Bonaparte – and he wasn’t that stupid – he didn’t think he had enough keys to put together a single map, just fragments of different maps.

He wondered if he could keep Bonaparte talking long enough for the zauberbiest to let slip what this book he was supposedly after was about.

‘I’m not going to hand over the map,’ Nick warned and his voice wasn’t nearly as strong or as forceful as he was aiming for given the amount of pain lacing each of his words. He was sure that if he tried to take a step closer to Bonaparte in the intersection of hallways that he’d fall flat on his face. Bones were trying to knit themselves back together, something he’d never felt before and it was frankly the least pleasant sensation Nick had ever experienced.

‘The item has no value to you,’ Bonaparte dismissed and Nick found that strange. Did Bonaparte not know he was married to a hexenbiest? At this point, Nick thought everyone knew but if he did know then wouldn’t he have realised that a lost hexenbiest treasure would be of plenty interest to Nick?

Well, if Bonaparte wasn’t up on the recent events in his life he wasn’t about to bring him up to speed. He was happy to keep Adalind as far from Bonaparte as possible. That didn’t make his lack of knowledge easy to swallow. It made Nick feel like he was missing something.

‘And how do you know this book you have is something I want?’ Nick demanded (he sounded angrier this time and less painfilled so that was a bonus).

Bonaparte smiled like he’d caught Nick exactly where he wanted him. It was unsettling to say the least, Nick felt like he was missing several important clues to make this conversation go his way. On the upside, he was pretty sure Bonaparte had gotten some wires crossed too, so he supposed that put them on even footing.

He just didn’t like the idea that someone else must have given Bonaparte the wrong information. If he was lucky, and this wasn’t something he ever thought he’d consider, Kenneth had managed to feed some bogus information to Black Claw to help draw out Bonaparte.

Of course, then Bonaparte withdrew a small cloth-wrapped book from his other pocket and held it up as though that proved everything. Nick hadn’t expected there to be an actual book and he only allowed his eyes a second to dart to the book before they focused back on Bonaparte’s face. He didn’t know what that book was but now he wanted it. If Bonaparte thought it was something Nick would fight for then, unfortunately, Nick was starting to feel like he should be fighting for it.

It seemed like the time for conversation was over. Nick lunged forward as though to grab the book but a soft sound drew him up short. He didn’t have time to wonder what it was, whether or not there was someone else down in the underground building helping Bonaparte, he was just grateful he’d aborted his lunge at the last moment.

In doing so, he successfully avoided being speared on the end of the sword that suddenly sprouted from Bonaparte’s chest. Blood burst from the zauberbiest’s mouth in a cough as the sword was pulled swiftly out again and he tumbled forward. Nick easily snatched the cloth-wrapped book from his still aloft hand as he fell, revealing Renard, sword in hand, looking down at Bonaparte with distaste.

‘Thanks,’ Nick said, not sure the word was exactly appropriate but feeling the sentiment was what counted.

Renard nodded.

‘How did you know we were here?’ Monroe wheezed.

‘Rosalee sent me,’ Renard replied. ‘Your phones aren’t working down here.’ He looked to Nick. ‘She had to take Adalind to the hospital.’

Nick, who had been crouching beside Bonaparte’s body checking his pockets for anything else that might be of interest, looked up sharply. ‘The baby?’

‘Not here yet,’ Renard informed him and there was a distinct lack of frostiness in Renard’s tone, like he’d finally come to terms with Nick and Adalind having a kid together.

Nick looked around the gloomy hallways of the maze. ‘Any idea what the quickest way out of here is?’

All three of them looked around. When they’d entered the underground maze, Nick hadn’t been expecting twisted corridors, dead ends and constant doubling back. Under normal circumstances he had a pretty good sense of direction, he just didn’t think that stood up to underground passageways that were literally a maze when his mind was on other things and he didn’t have time to properly explore.

In the end, Monroe led the way, following Renard’s path back the best he could by scent with Renard helping where he could. Not one of them wanted to spend more time down there than necessary, though Renard did comment that they’d need to find a better way to navigate than Monroe’s nose when they came down to remove Bonaparte’s body and search for anything Grimm related.

Nick pointedly failed to bring up the hexenbiest treasure Bonaparte had apparently been searching for. He’d wait to tell Adalind about that one and see what she wanted to do with the news. Maybe she’d have some idea of what Bonaparte was looking for.

Even with Monroe’s nose and Renard’s fairly solid memory of how he’d gotten to them, it still took them half an hour to navigate their way outside. By the time they reached the surface, Nick was itching to get to the hospital, desperate not to miss the birth of his son. As soon as he set foot on damp grass his phone started beeping, message after message coming in now that he was in contact with a cell tower again.

He didn’t bother checking any of the messages but phoned Rosalee. The phone barely rang once before she was picking it up. ‘Nick! Thank god! Are you okay? Is Monroe? We’re at the hospital, you need to get here fast, I don’t think it’s going to be much longer.’

‘I’m fine, Monroe is mostly fine, how’s Adalind?’ As he spoke he had a silent conversation with Renard in which the Captain motioned that he would make arrangements to deal with Bonaparte’s body.

Nick didn’t need to be told twice, he and Monroe made for his car at as fast a pace as Monroe could manage, wheezing as he was. He might have broken a few traffic laws getting to the hospital but he knew people, he could smooth that over if anything came of it.

While he drove like he was in hot pursuit of a suspect, Monroe carefully checked through the messages on their phones. There were dozens of messages from Rosalee and half as many from Adalind all demanding to know where the two of them were and to hurry and get to the hospital as fast as possible. Monroe skimmed through those, checking for any messages from Trubel or any of the others they had out dealing with the secret society.

There weren’t as many as Nick was hoping for. Henrietta had left two messages, the first confirming safe arrival and contact, the second that she had easily killed her target and would make arrangements to return home shortly. Nick had come to respect Henrietta after all she had done for his family and was relieved to learn she was alive and well.

There were seven messages from Kenneth, one of which advised Nick he had been feeding misinformation to Black Claw, another which hastily added that he’d just learned that some of that misinformation had been successful and three more messages which covered the death of his own target, the unfortunate discovery of three other people linked to the society in the building and their subsequent deaths.

The last message from Kenneth felt more like a threat and mentioned the Royals would remain in Austria to gather their remaining power and rebuild their little empire. The threat came when Kenneth’s message ended with the suggestion he’d be in touch.

Frankly, Nick didn’t want anything more to do with the Royals but he didn’t see the King letting go of Diana any time soon.

There were a couple of messages from Renard telling them his own search had been fruitless but that he’d received word from his mother that her target had been eliminated and that she was taking her time pilfering anything of value from her target’s collection. It seemed a little cold to rob them after killing them but Nick couldn’t argue keeping powerful books and objects out of the hands of the society’s family members wasn’t a bad idea.

Buried amongst all those messages was a single message from his mother letting him know she’d arrived safe and acquired her target. Nothing after that and no messages from Trubel or Josh, just two from Bud, trying his own luck getting hold of Nick and three from Hank and two from Wu explaining they’d caught their real estate developer and were starting on the properties Renard had given them to search.

Hank and Wu were the only ones who didn’t sound too concerned, though it sounded like they’d hit on another stash of books and weapons at the second property they looked at.

It was a lot of to take in but it filled the drive to the hospital with something other than nervous energy and that was probably the only reason Nick didn’t break more laws getting to the hospital.

He had to leave Monroe in the emergency room before he made his way up to maternity. He found Rosalee pacing in front of the nurse’s station and she practically pounced on him the moment she saw him. ‘Nick!’

‘Am I too late?’

Rosalee shook her head. ‘I think you’re just in time.’ She looked over his shoulder as though expecting to see Monroe. ‘Where’s Monroe?’

Nick winced. ‘Downstairs in emergency, we ran into Bonaparte.’

Rosalee’s eyes widened. ‘Is he…?

Nick nodded. ‘Bonaparte’s dead.’

Rosalee breathed out a sigh of releif, ‘Good.’

For a moment, they just stood there looking at each other before they both seemed to realise they had better places to be. Rosalee stepped forward, grabbed Nick in a quick hug and then pointed him in the direction of Adalind’s room before she darted away to the elevator to find Monroe.

Nick didn’t glance back to watch her go, he did have somewhere he needed to be, after all.

Adalind looked up when he burst into the room (probably a little more dramatically than was strictly necessary) and the smile she shot him was filled with relief. She reached for him as he approached the bed and he took her hand, leaning down to kiss her forehead. She looked exhausted, face pressed into the pillows on the bed as she leaned over something that looked like a giant peanut.

The hand that was grabbing his suddenly tightened and she cried out in pain, her other hand clenching around the bed sheets. ‘You’re here,’ she breathed once the contraction had passed, slumping face first into the bed. ‘Help me up.’

He did as she asked, helping her move until she was standing beside the bed in front of him. Both of her hands went up to rest on his shoulders and her head slumped forward onto his chest. ‘Where’s Diana?’ he asked because he didn’t think asking her if she was okay was the greatest choice he could make right then.

‘With Bud,’ she told him. ‘His wife and kids are away so he’s staying at the loft with her.’

Nick nodded. Every other person they’d normally have had on babysitting duty was scattered across the globe trying to take down the secret society. He had no idea if they were succeeding, if killing the members as they had would truly break the society and the hold they had on Black Claw. He didn’t want to check his phone to see if new messages had come in from his mother or Trubel. He didn’t want to know what was happening to them in case it was something he had to worry about. Right now, he was exactly where he needed to be, his mind on exactly what it needed to be on. He could worry about the society and the rest of his mother and friends once the baby was born and he knew Adalind and his son were okay.

Adalind’s hands tightened on his shoulders and she cried out again. ‘Midwife!’ she hissed through the pain and Nick blindly reached for the bed, grabbing the remote to push the call button.

A short, round, grey haired woman entered the room moments later and smiled when she saw him. ‘You must be Nick, I’m Grace. Glad you got here on time!’ she turned to Adalind with a firm expression. ‘Adalind, I need you to get on the bed for me, honey, on your knees so we can see how close this little guy is to entering the world.’

The answer was close. Really close. After that everything seemed to slow down and move really fast at the same time. Like moments would freeze and then time would speed up and suddenly everything would be frozen again. He followed Grace’s instructions as best he could, soothing Adalind as much as he could, given there was a person making its way out of her.

Hearing Adalind in so much pain made time crawl but the moments in between, the midwife instructing her to push, to relax, the moments when she declared she could see the head, that the shoulders were coming and the baby had turned just like he should, they went by so fast.

In a blink, there was a slightly blue shocked looking baby being placed in Adalind’s arms as Nick helped ease her back down onto the bed. Time froze and all he could do was stare down at his son nestled against Adalind’s chest under the old shirt she was wearing. Skin to skin contact keeping baby warm, establishing a moment of peace.

He cut the cord, remembered kissing Adalind and taking her hand as they stared down at the tiny baby they’d created. He remembered having conversations with the midwife with an OB doctor but he couldn’t remember what they were about. All he remembered clearly about that moment was that his son was alive and well and he was here.

‘He’s beautiful,’ Adalind breathed.

Nick smiled, brushing sweaty strands of hair from her face. ‘He is.’

‘He looks like you.’

Nick laughed. Given that right at that moment their son still looked like a wrinkly and slimy alien creature he wasn’t sure what to make of that but he supposed he got what Adalind was seeing. There was already a wisp of dark hair on his head, features that could one day grow to resemble his own. He imagined what their son might one day look like, a little version of him, a stark contrast to Diana who was already growing to be the spitting image of Adalind.

Eventually, the midwife eased him out of Adalind’s grasp so they could weigh him, test his reflexes and so on. Nick took the opportunity to slip outside the room and message Rosalee to let her know he was here with all of his ten perfect little fingers and ten tiny little toes. She messaged him back immediately with a “congratulations!” and a note that she’d be up to visit as soon as they were ready for visitors. It wasn’t like she had far to go, she was still down in emergency waiting on some x-rays for Monroe.

He thought about checking his other messages, there were a dozen new ones now, but instead he pocketed his phone and went back to his wife and son.

Hours later, Adalind was asleep in bed and Nick was cradling his son in his arms. He was sure he hadn’t stopped smiling since the little guy had been born but Nick didn’t think anyone would blame him for his new father grin. He glanced at the bed and his expression softened. Freshly showered and in a pair of clean pyjamas, Adalind was deep asleep. He was content to sit there, holding his son in his arms and watch over her until she woke.

He would spend the rest of his life watching over her and the family they had created together.

He glanced down again at the baby in his arms and found big eyes staring up at him sleepily. Nick smiled, ‘You, Nate Kelly Burkhardt, have the best mom in the world, the best big sister who already loves you-’

‘And the best dad,’ Adalind murmured sleepily from the bed.

‘Sorry,’ Nick whispered, ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

Adalind shook her head. ‘It’s this bed, it really not comfortable.’

‘Tomorrow night you’ll be home in your own bed.’

‘Thank god.’

Nick got to his feet, moving to Adalind’s side so he could gently place their son in her arms. ‘I can’t believe we did this,’ he whispered.

‘Who’d have thought, right?’ Adalind smiled. ‘A Grimm and a hexenbiest?’

‘Yeah,’ Nick agreed. ‘A Grimm and a hexenbiest.’


	45. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the support, the kudos and comments. This story has been an amazing experience and that has been largely because of my wonderful readers.

a/n: This story has been my life for a year (almost to the day!) and it would not have been possible without your amazing and continued support. I won’t say this is goodbye forever because this fandom is way too amazing for that but I need to focus on my original novel for a while and I also need to finish the Harry Potter story I left hanging.

Thank you for the amazing reviews, the continued encouragements and the favourites and follows!

Necessary Sins – Epilogue

A year ago, the only thing cluttering his desk was work. He’d never been the kind of man to fill his workspace with photo  
s of loved ones, mostly because for a long time he hadn’t really felt like he had a family to display, to show off. He’d had that one photo of Juliette for a while but there’d been an incident involving a witness, some flailing limbs and some projectile vomit and the frame with her photo had been a casualty.

He’d never bothered to replace it. Probably should have taken that as a sign, looking back. Now though, his desk was a mess of photos, artwork and home to at least two mugs that proclaimed him to be an awesome dad and a fabulous husband. He had three photos at any given time showing Adalind and the kids, one with his mom playing with her grandkids and even one of him asleep with both Diana and Nate sprawled on top of him. Diana insisted on bringing in new artwork for him to display at least once a week and so there was a good portion of Hank’s desk (and Wu’s too for that matter) that were slowly being taken over by the colourful scribblings of a mostly three-year-old (they were calling it three now, there’d been some assessment from a wesen paediatrician so that was what they’d settled on).

Nick loved everything about it. For the first time in his life he truly felt like he had the family he’d always dreamed about, the life he’d always pictured for himself. And that included being knee deep in wesen drama, 4AM feeds and sleepless nights with explosive diapers and ear infections (surprisingly, that last one was his mother – she had not been pleasant) and everything that came with being a parent in a perfectly normal household – because honestly, the definition of normal was fluid even if you weren’t a Grimm married to a hexenbiest.

‘Oh, the look is back,’ Wu observed. ‘Should I come back?’

‘What look?’ Nick asked coming out of his thoughts to look at Wu who had just approached his desk, iPad in hand.

‘It’s your Happily Married Family Man look,’ Wu explained. ‘It’s vaguely nauseating.’

Nick snorted. ‘I do not have a look.’

‘Hank,’ Wu implored, looking over at Nick’s partner. ‘Help me out, does Nick have a look?’

‘Glazed eyes, dreamy smile?’ Hank asked. ‘Yeah, he’s got a look.’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Did you get something?’ he asked Wu, effectively putting an end to the conversation because he would never admit it, but yeah, he has a look.

‘Registration for the shot gun we found in Tallman’s car,’ Wu explained giving him a look that let Nick know Wu knew exactly what he was doing but it didn’t change the fact that they all knew there was a look. ‘Belongs to Tallman’s sister-in-law but she reported it stolen three months ago.’

‘And it ended up in her brother-in-law’s car?’ Hank wasn’t exactly surprised by the news, more by the stupidity of some people.

‘Three months, though?’ Nick said. ‘That’s a long time to be planning this.’

Wu shrugged. ‘The whole thing probably would have gone off without a hitch if security hadn’t gotten sick and been in the wrong corridor.’

‘Yeah,’ Hank agreed. ‘Can’t imagine they were planning on killing the guy from the beginning. The other two were really freaked when they learned Tallman shot the guard.’

Nick shook his head and was about to suggest they go and collect Tallman’s sister-in-law when Renard stuck his head out of his office and called him in. Renard didn’t wait to see if Nick was responding to his summons, he just turned and went back into his office. Nick exchanged a glance with Hank and Wu before he got up and headed into Renard’s office.

Things between him and the Captain had been strained in the beginning and while Nick would like to think some of the tension had bled away now that Renard was a firm part of Diana’s life there were still moments when it became apparent Renard was jealous of Nick’s place in their daughter’s life. Renard might have helped create Diana but Nick was the first man she’d ever called “daddy”, the first father she’d ever known and that didn’t sit well with Renard. Nick didn’t blame him, he just wasn’t sure there was anything he could do about it.

Renard’s desk wasn’t as cluttered as Nick’s but it was now home to a picture of Diana and a single drawing. There’d been some questioning looks around the precinct when people had started to notice Nick and Renard had pictures of the same kid but no one had out right asked about it and Nick thought Wu or Hank might have had a quiet word with some of the officers because the looks had died down and everyone now seemed to know that Nick was married to Renard’s ex and they weren’t making a thing of it.

In fact, because he was so used to the mess of clutter his desk had become it took Nick a moment to realise that not only was Renard’s desk tidy but it was too tidy. There were piles of neatly stacked reports missing, his laptop was packed away and, when he glanced over his shoulder, Nick realised the small liquor cabinet was empty.

‘What’s going on?’ Nick asked, which wasn’t what he’d intended to say but he was suddenly suspicious of his summons.

Renard motioned for him to take a seat and leant back in his own chair. ‘I’ve been offered a job.’

That was not at all what Nick was expecting. ‘A job?’

Renard nodded. ‘My father reached out to me and offered me a position working with the Royal families to rebuild after Black Claw.’

Nick’s eyebrows shot up. He’d always been under the impression Renard wasn’t welcome amongst the Royals, though come to think of it, Adalind might have said something about it being the King’s wife who’d originally threatened Renard’s life. They hadn’t seemed to have much issue with Diana before she was born, they’d certainly been fighting for control of her. That did suggest the issue was with Renard in particular and not bastard children.

‘There have been a lot of changes within the Royal families these last years. My father thinks it’s time I join the family business.’

A part of Nick wanted to seek clarification on just what the family business was and whether or not Renard was using the word business as a euphemism but he refrained. Mostly because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. There’d been a lot less trying to kill him since they’d joined forces to bring down Black Claw, Nick would almost say he and the Royals were on good terms. Well, as good as things could be between a Grimm and the Royal families. Most of the trouble they caused happened in Europe and that made it the problem of the Wesen Council and other Grimms, Nick had enough on his plate dealing with Portland.

‘It’s a good opportunity,’ Renard said and then he added, ‘It might be the best way to protect Diana if she ever regains her powers,’ as though he needed to justify his choices with Nick.

‘You’re taking the job.’

Renard nodded.

‘You’re not taking Diana.’ It was a statement not a question, there was no way in hell, Nick was letting that happen and Adalind was much more likely to kill Renard than even entertain it as an option.

Renard shook his head. ‘I spent my earliest years around the Royals, I don’t want that for her.’

Nick wanted to believe that was the biggest sign of all that Renard had changed since meeting his daughter but he thought it more likely his mother knew all about this job offer and had been there with cautious words and advice. Elizabeth loved Diana, doted on her like any grandmother should, Nick couldn’t imagine she’d want the constant running and power struggles for Diana, she’d hidden Renard so well to avoid most of that, not just to keep him alive.

‘I still want holidays,’ Renard said.

‘You won’t be able to have weekends now,’ Nick pointed out. ‘And I’m not sure Adalind’s going to agree to sending her to Vienna for Christmas.’

‘I know,’ Renard said. ‘I’ll come home for holidays. Perhaps when she’s older we can reconsider.’

Nick nodded slowly but he was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Renard was moving, leaving the country and he wasn’t taking Diana with him, was actually acknowledging that staying with Nick and Adalind was best for her. There had to be a catch.

‘There’s no catch?’ Adalind asked that night, toothbrush in one hand as she looked at him incredulously.

‘Apparently not,’ Nick replied, taking the toothpaste tube from her other hand.

‘He’s just leaving?’

‘Yep,’ Nick confirmed. ‘At the end of the week. We’re meeting our new captain tomorrow.’

Adalind met his eyes in the mirror and shook her head. ‘I don’t like it. I mean, I love that he’s not going to be here, that the most we’ll have to deal with him is holidays and Skype calls but this is so wrong. We’re never this lucky.’

‘I know,’ Nick agreed. ‘I want to know what the Royals have planned. As much as I’m sure Renard wants to believe his father is reaching out, I doubt the King has ever done anything so altruistic in his life.’

Adalind nodded, clearly on the same page. ‘Have you heard from Trubel yet?’ she asked, changing the subject to one that was filled with a lot less political dangers but still slightly murky.

Nick shook his head. ‘Josh got an email yesterday, said she was in Vancouver looking into that Grimm stash tied to the Dobrini family up there but he hasn’t heard whether or not she found anything yet.’

‘Do you think she will?’

‘I don’t know. There are still fifteen keys missing that we know about, could be more. More maps, more treasure. We’re talking centuries of Grimm paranoia here.’

‘What about that hexenbiest treasure?’

Nick shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

They stood side by side brushing their teeth and contemplating what Renard’s move could mean, what the Royals might be up to and whether or not Trubel was having any luck locating the new Grimm treasure stashes they’d learned about. There were too many unknowns, too many questions and concerns and Nick didn’t know if they needed the answers, if they’d ever get the answers or if they were questions he even needed the answers to. (Which was exactly as confusing as it sounded.) There was every chance the Royals would keep to themselves, that they’d leave him and his family alone – for the most part. They’d never truly be free of them when Diana was, for all intents and purposes, one of them.

It just seemed highly unlikely. Whether he’d intended it or not Nick and his friends had become major players in the wesen world. They controlled more secrets than they’d ever realised, had more contacts in the wesen world than any one Grimm had ever had before. They were moving up in the wesen world and Nick just couldn’t see the Royals sitting back and letting that happen.

There was something coming, something big, but Nick was still unsure whether or not he and his family were about to be swept up in its wake.

Shattering his thoughts, Diana started screaming which set Nate off. He and Adalind rinsed their mouths quickly, dropped their brushes in the cup on the sink and responded to the noise. He took Diana, Adalind went to sort out Nate and Nick couldn’t help thinking that no matter what happened, no matter what came their way, they would always have this moment.

World changing conversations over the bathroom sink with toothbrushes in hand and kids demanding attention. That was the life Nick had found for himself and he wouldn’t change it for the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know. I left it open for a sequel. I'm not ready to let these characters go but I need to focus on other projects for a while.


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